Scythe ( Shusterman)

Scythe by Neal Shusterman (2016)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

I almost labeled this one fantasy as well as sci-fi, but it's just a sufficiently adnaced society. There was anything "magical" about it. This was another book recommended by a friend who wants to have a pandemic book club.

In the future, the Cloud becomes self-aware and becomes known by humans as The Thunderhead, which becomes the arbiter of all laws and disputes. Soon, diesase and death are eradicated as every human has nanites that will eventual heal them no matter how badly they are hurt. The only exception, it seems, is when the body is burned beyond recognition and cannot be repaired. On the other hand, "splatting" from a tall building dozens of stories high leads to only temporary deadification until you're body is repaired in a few days. Even old age can be reversed by "turning the corner", and moving the body's clock back to its 40s or 30s or 20s.

In a world without death, population control falls to an orgazination of Scythes, who operate separate from the Thunderhead. Scythes chose people to be gleaned, killed irrevocably. Scythes themselves cannot be killed permanently, except through self-gleaning (and I had a question about that but I'll leave it).

Citra Terranova and Rowan Damisch are both picked to be apprentices to Scythe Faraday. It's unusal to pick two but Faraday is not the usual scythe. He intends to let them compete for the spot, with one becoming a scythe and the other returning to their "normal" life. Neither wants the job, but they find out that this is the first qualification to getting it.

Scythes take the names of patrons, giving up their birth names, but I don't see this dictating behavior much, except that Curie is one of the good ones. Goddard is the bad guy trying to upend everything "scythedom" stands for and usher in a new age for scythes.

It was a quick read despite its length (400+ pages) and entertaining despite its dark subject matter. It seemed that rules got broken a few times, and I wasn't sure how this competitition survived a few plot twists. By the end, it seems that both had earned the right to be scythes except for a judgment from months earlier.

Other tidbits that I could mention just so I don't forget them, but after the next book club meeting, I don't know if I'll be talking about this any more. There are a couple of sequels, and I wouldn't rule out reading one, if the thought to do so crosses my mind a few months from now.

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