This past year, AI (artificial intelligence) has been the major topic of conversation across school and university campuses, as well as in other workplace settings. ChatGPT has made AI more visible in most people’s lives today. However, Neal Shusterman incorporated AI as one of his main characters in his Arc of the Scythe book series, with the first instalment released in 2016. In fact, the second book of the trilogy, Thunderhead is narrated by the AI character, who governs much of humanity’s day-to-day life. Unlike the YA science fiction tales of the early 2000s set in the future like The Hunger Games or Divergent, or other well-known more adult examples of the genre with such as Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s A Handmaiden’s Tale, this series constructs improved through technology, advanced medicine, and benevolent utopian governance.
Arc of the Scythe imagines a future where the default setting for people is not to die by accident, through disease or even from old age. This feat is achieved by an extension of the central AI in the form of ‘nanites’ or micro-robots medically inserted into the blood of all people and animals in the ‘Age of the post-mortals’. The nanites carry out different functions which control pain, and allow natural functions of the human body to head at an accelerated pace. Theoretically nobody has to die, or pay the consequences for individual mistakes since the nanites can fix broken bones, damaged organs, and revive a person after they have jumped (or been pushed) off a building. Nanites inoculate bodies from harmful viruses, bacteria or parasites. Nanites can even reset the body’s chronological age. Several characters we meet in this series are nearly 200 years old, but appear to be in their 30s, 40s, or 50s, after choosing to undergo a process called ‘turning a corner.’
Obviously, this does cause a problem—overpopulation—which in this imagined post-mortal world is ‘solved’ in the form of the Scythe, an elite, venerable organisation, whose members literally have the power of death and life. Since the AI has been programmed to uphold the tenet that permanent death is the domain of humankind, it cedes this responsibility to the Scythe to chose who should be ‘gleaned’. Paradoxically, the Scythe can also grant immunity from any gleaning for one year, which they often do as a comfort to relatives of an individual they have selected to glean. In theory, the Scythe not only chose who should die, they have an obligation to make all their selections in an ‘unbiased manner’ while fulfil a required yearly-kill-quota, set at regular Scythe conclaves (meetings) through the year. In this post-mortal age, the AI can speak directly to any person via their nanites, and many people regularly have daily conversations with the AI. However, because the AI cannot interfere with Scythe business, the AI goes silent in the presence of a Scythe—perhaps foreshadowing a gleaning is about to take place to the truly observant.
There are four books that make up the Arc of the Scythe series: Scythe, Thunderhead, The Toll, and Gleanings. The first three titles loosely follow two characters, Rowan Damisch and Citra Terranova, who at the beginning of the series are teenagers that are apprenticed under Scythe Faraday, and are set to become part of the next generation of Scythe. Through these two characters, readers are introduced, then situated into this futuristic world, which although it has seemingly solved the major problems in our own time, such as Climate Change, global war, economic inequality and disease and death, other problems have arisen in their place with an equally existential nature. After hundreds of years, the Scythe are the only humans with any power that matters, and as immortals they have become like mercurial ancient gods. Like these epic narratives, battles between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ play out incorporating sophisticated technology, as AI has become a key player working behind-the-scenes to shape human events.
The fourth volume, Gleanings is a series of short stories which expand on the lives of and histories of characters introduced in the trilogy, and serve to further expand on Neal Shusterman’s fictional universe. Released in 2022, it was written in collaboration with fellow writers: David Yoon, Jarrod Shusterman, Sofía Lapuente, Michael H. Payne, Michelle Knowlden, and Joelle Shusterman. Gleanings is as engaging as all of the books in the series, and while it can be read as a stand-alone work, it is more appreciated if it is read with the others. All of these books are engaging, thought-provoking and thrilling to read.
This is the draft version of what was published in my newsletter The Four Corners
