I haven’t managed to finish the last few picks for the book club. Last month’s was The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which had overly flowery prose and never managed to get to any point. That was a real disappointment since I remember liking Frankenstein very much. The month before was Wool by Hugh Howey which also felt very poorly written. It feels good to finally finish one again.
This book is a sci-fi tale about a future where death has effectively been eradicated. Diseases have all been cured, ageing can be reversed, even horrific injuries can be completely healed. In fact a friend of the male protagonist has a habit of “splatting”, jumping off of a tall building, just for the experience of it. There is no real crime in this world, other than minor littering. Everything is controlled by a central AI called the Thunderhead which can raise children, control the weather, and revive “deadish” people along with just about anything else. They call our times, before this revolution, the “age of mortality”.
Clearly left alone this would lead to a massive overpopulation problem. To deal with this humanity has created a class of people called Scythes. Scythes are allowed to “glean” people, to kill them permanently, as a means of population control. Each have their own techniques, both for choosing who to glean, as well as how. The two protagonists of this book, Rowan and Citra, are selected by a Scythe named Faraday to become apprentices. They will both train, and one of them will become a new Scythe. Faraday hopes to keep the practice of being a Scythe a noble pursuit, one followed with compassion and care. There are others, in particular a man called Goddard, who instead view it as glorious, something that is a joy. He practices mass-gleanings, often killing hundreds at a time in brutal fashion. He also suggests a rule, which gets ratified by the head Scythe, that whichever of Faraday’s apprentices becomes a Scythe has to glean the other one.
The book is clearly written for a Young Adult audience, so I am not the target market. At one point the male protagonist talks about someone “blowing a brainstem”. I feel though that the writing style is to the detriment of the ideas here, and I can’t tell if the author is writing down to the audience or they’re just not very good. The protagonists are both teenagers as expected for this style of book, but they both feel almost identical in terms of personality. They are both very intelligent, very quick-witted, incredibly skilled at whatever they try, strong-willed, and wry. In fact most of the characters have a very similar manner of speech, even the characters that are supposed to be awe-inspiring and dominating tend to talk like teenagers. There are characters that do horrible things because they’re bad, and noble characters that act in a less self-interested way but that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t think that is supposed to be the case, because the author is constantly telling us defining characteristics of the characters, it’s just that the characters never really show it.
It feels like there are several plot holes, or underdeveloped ideas in the book. For instance, in the first trials for the apprentices to become Scythes, Citra is asked to tell everyone the worst thing she has ever done. She answers with a lie, and Scythe Curie instantly knows that it is the case. I don’t think the book ever explains why or how that happens.
One of the central turning points of the plot is when Scythe Faraday dies, both apprentices are convinced that he was murdered by Goddard. It turns out near the end that actually he isn’t dead, he simply escaped to South America so that Rowan and Citra would be released from being apprentices and no longer have to be put in the position of the winner gleaning the loser. Since he faked his own suicide and was never murdered, I think that means Goddard never did anything against the rules. He was just hungry for power, and tasteless. He is a cackling villain in the book, but it seems like a weak point of the plot that these supposed noble Scythes never thought through the system enough to protect against people like him.
I’m unclear about the mechanics of the revival of deadish people in the book. It sounds like nanotechnology called nanites live in people’s blood, and there are drones which ship bodies to recovery centres. If someone dies with a building collapsing on them, what happens? How do the nanites know not to heal people when it is a Scythe that kills them? Why did ambu-drones not pick up Faraday’s body? How was he revived without people knowing, when as soon as Citra woke up all the Scythes were alerted to her presence?
I think I’m just asking the book to be something that it never was going to be. I really like the concept, and I flew through the pages. I just wish it was more coherent, or that it did more with the idea. When the concept is that people are living for hundreds of years it feels disappointing to spend all the time with teenagers. I’d like to be in the head of people that are ancient and see what that does.