Scythe
Neal Shusterman
A Spherical Cow novel
Imagine this: the problem of mortality has been solved. Disease has been abolished. The problem of violent death has also been solved: If you fall from a 100-story building onto a concrete pavement, an ambu-drone will come, scrape your remains off the pavement, and bring you to a medical center where you will be completely revived within a few days. Aging is also a solved problem: an adult can at any time of his/her choice "turn the corner," and become a young adult (biological age your choice) again.
In principle everyone could live forever. That would cause problems, of course. The one that Neal Shusterman principally seems to worry about is over-population and resource exhaustion. OK, fine, let's go with that. The Earth has finite carrying capacity and folks still want to have children. Scythe is not about that. It's about the solution that the powers-that-be have chosen.
The solution is to bring death back. A certain number of people become Scythes. The job of a Scythe is to kill people, although they substitute the euphemism "glean" for "kill." A Scythe is not subject to the ordinary civic authorities. Instead Scythes are subject only to the World Scythe Council. There are rules that Scythes are supposed to follow: "The Scythe Commandments." Although the tenth commandment is "Thou shalt be beholden to no laws beyond these," that is not actually true. For instance, each Scythe is given a yearly quota of gleanings -- the Scythe Commandments make no mention of a quota, or indeed of obedience to a World Scythe Council, yet Scythes who transgress against the judgments of the Council are punished.
Does this all seem as absurdly contrived to you as it does to me? It is reminiscent of a classroom problem in an undergraduate Ethical Philosophy course. Or it is like those over-simplified problems physicists study in their thought experiments. Physicists even have a code phrase for these kinds of problems: Spherical Cows. It comes from a tired old joke, with the punchline "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum." Now, understand, in their proper place, Spherical Cow problems are extraordinarily useful in philosophy and physics.
They are not -- and this is my opinion only -- an adequate stratum on which to erect a compelling novel. I insert the disclaimer because any number of talented authors have written Spherical Cow novels. Scythe is one such. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model is another such, although Tchaikovsky's cows are noticeably knobblier than Shusterman's. Ray Bradbury was a notable originator of Spherical Cow stories. The problem with Spherical Cow novels, for me, is that they are unconvincing.
Obviously Scythedom is an institution that begs to be abused. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Scythe. That's all I'm going to say about the plot. The characters were simplistic -- they didn't feel human to me.
I will not read any more of the series.
I would generally consider myself a Neal Shusterman fan, but I also read the Scythe and then didn't bother continuing with the series. I loved the Unwind books, so it will be hard to find something to top that.