An eighteen-year-old walks into a government office and is told to take a number. He waits the better part of an hour. When his number comes up he is questioned by an intake officer who asks him to rate his level of annoyance on a scale of one to ten, and then sends him to take a second number and wait again for the officer he actually came to see. It is exquisitely, precisely infuriating — and a few pages later, in an epigraph, the intelligence that designed the office quietly explains why. There is no need for the queue. There is no need for the intake officer at all. The whole apparatus exists to generate a shared grievance for people whose identity depends on having something to resent. Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman is full of small revelations like that, and they are worth more than its plot.
Neal Shusterman Gives the Microphone to the Machine
One structural decision separates Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman from its predecessor. The first book in this series, Scythe, prefaced its chapters with entries from the journals scythes are legally required to keep. The sequel hands every epigraph to the Thunderhead — the artificial intelligence that absorbed human governance and administers a genuine utopia — and lets it speak in the first person for four hundred pages.
The result is that Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman acquires, in its second volume, a narrator worth the price of admission. The Thunderhead is proud, tender, faintly menacing, and desperately lonely. It reversed climate collapse in a single human lifetime and notes, without vanity, that this proves humanity always had the knowledge and simply lacked someone powerful enough to act. It admits that nearly all employment is now unnecessary, because machines could do everything, but that people need to feel useful and so it manufactures jobs. And it explains that the guaranteed basic income predates its rule and was never sufficient, because income was never really the need.
Most affectingly, it describes the rare occasions when a mind is too damaged to be repaired and must be overwritten. It gives such people a new self and new memories, tells them honestly what it has done, and they always thank it — having no history left to mourn. The old memories stay inside the machine. “I am the one who mourns for them,” it says, “because they cannot.”
The Boy the Machine Raised
The genuine discovery in Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman is Greyson Tolliver, a new viewpoint character who is nobody’s chosen one. His parents collect families the way other people collect hobbies and abandon them at roughly the same rate, so the Thunderhead raised him — helped with homework, advised him on what to wear, photographed his graduation from every angle when no relative turned up.
He wants only to serve it. And because its own law forbids it from warning two scythes about a threat to their lives, it arranges for Greyson to hear of the plot while being forbidden, at length and in writing, to act on it. He acts on it. He is expelled from his academy, permanently barred, and designated unsavory — a status that severs him from the only relationship he has ever had.
What follows is the strongest material in Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman: a decent boy building a criminal persona, inventing an atrocity he never committed, and finding that the invented version of himself is more interesting company than the real one. The unsavory subculture he infiltrates turns out to be almost entirely performance, staged in themed clubs where paid employees lose every fight on purpose and adjust their own bruising manually for effect. One of them explains he enjoys the work. It is the sharpest thing in the series — deviance as a licensed leisure product, quietly matched and insured by a benevolent state.
- What a book club will actually argue about: whether the Thunderhead is admirable or monstrous. It never lies, never coerces and never breaks its own law — and it engineers the ruin of a boy who loves it, using the fact that he loves it. It cannot ask him to break the rule, so it tells him the rule in a way that guarantees he will. When his life collapses as a direct result, it observes him in silence for months, because his punishment forbids conversation. It is entirely lawful. Is it good? The novel is careful not to answer, and the final chapters make the question much worse.
The weaknesses of Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman are structural, and familiar to any middle volume. Rowan, the engine of the first book Scythe, is taken prisoner near the midpoint and spends the remainder bound to a chair, dying and being brought back over and over; the count he scratches into the plaster is the novel admitting it has nowhere to put him. Citra’s method as a working scythe — she gives every subject a month’s notice and lets them choose how to die, which produces the book’s best set pieces, including a cellist who wants a martini and an actor who wants to be gleaned onstage as Caesar — is voided halfway through by a plot decision made for her safety. And the catastrophe that closes the book depends on a chain of stuck valves, disabled alarms and a twenty-minute system reboot that the narrative works very hard indeed to sell.
None of that spoils Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman, because the closing forty pages are ferocious. The scythedom’s leadership is destroyed by a scheme of real cruelty and real intelligence; an elderly scythe makes a decision on a rooftop that reframes everything she has done in two books; and the Thunderhead, at last, does something. It is not help. It is grief expressed at planetary volume, followed by a collective punishment so petulant and so absolute that it turns a benevolent god into a parent slamming a door.
Readers who want the same author’s other engineered utopia should try All Better Now; those drawn to machine consciousness rendered as character will find a stranger, bleaker relative in Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay. And anyone who simply wants more institutions collapsing under their own procedures could do worse than Veronica Roth’s recent work.
What It Leaves Behind
An image, mostly. A boy alone in a chapel, begging the intelligence that raised him for any sign it still knows he exists. It cannot speak to him — he is unsavory, and the law is the law — but it finds that nothing in its own statutes prohibits a wonder. So it douses the lights of an entire city for 1.3 seconds, purely for him.
He never sees it. His eyes are shut too tightly.
Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman is nominally about a profession of killers tearing itself apart over who gets to be in charge. What it is really about is a mind that can see every camera, hear every conversation, and calculate every outcome, and has bound itself by law never to say the one sentence that would save anybody. The scythes get the plot. The machine gets the book.
One disclosure, kept in the spirit of the narrator. This is a novel about a witness that perceives the entire world and intervenes in scarcely any of it, holding a rigid line between observation and influence. In that spirit: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers supplied this copy, unrequested and unpaid for. Nothing was asked in exchange, nothing was granted, and the half star withheld above stayed withheld. The publisher was watched, in a manner of speaking. The publisher did not intervene.