Hoi,
My name is Sanne
and today I'm going to try and convince you to read the Arc of a Scythe series.
The moment I started recording,
I felt the pressure.
A few years ago,
I made a video talking about how I had been such a long time since I finished a
trilogy since the original YA trilogy era.
But I've been doing a lot of reading since,
and I have a few series that I would love to talk to you about.
I feel like my end of year wrap up videos where I talk about my favourite books.
That isn't quite enough time to fully sell you on a
series.
It can be a bit of a hard sell sometimes because it is a big time investment in this new video
series.
I am going to talk to you about different trilogies or maybe even longer
series and talk about the things that I love about them that I think makes them unique and
also just give you a little bit more information.
You can decide for yourself whether you want to dive into them.
So for the first episode,
we're doing arc of a side probably heard people talk about this on YouTube on Instagram.
You might even own the first in the series,
or maybe even the full trilogy.
I got my first copy of the book from the publisher when it came out in 2016,
but I didn't end up reading it until 2020.
I think for the longest time,
I just didn't really have a clear picture of like what this world was.
And even though this cover is,
I think absolutely beautiful and the illustration was done by Kevin Tong,
I couldn't quite place this,
whether this was like dystopian or had more of a historical twist to it.
And so I think when I found out a little bit more about it,
that's when I started reading it.
It ended up in my top 10 books of 2020 and in the next year I read the 2nd
and 3rd book,
Thunderhead and The Toll.
They also made it onto my favourite books of the year list,
and since then I have in person convinced to people to read the full
series,
one of whom is my brother was quite funny,
because I used to,
like push books onto him when we were younger,
but had been a really long time since.
He had, like,
picked up a full series.
And then there is a brand new short story collection called Gleanings.
And because this has just been released,
I got the chance to interview Neal Shusterman and basically have the opportunity to
ask him some questions that I think would fit perfectly in this video. Surprise!
I have special guest Neal Shusterman here today.
He might be a little biased when it comes to the series,
but it would be very fun opportunity for us to film together and ask him some questions.
Happy to answer.
One of the Scythe of commandments is thou shalt glean without any bias.
So before I give you the series pitch,
I first wanted to ask Neal Shusterman about what inspired the series in the first
place.
How did you get the idea for the series initially?
Initially,
the idea for Scythe came about after seeing 10 years of dystopia.
Teen dystopia was the biggest thing.
I had already written a dystopian series called Unwind.
There were five books in that series,
and the last thing I wanted to do was to write another dystopian story.
So I thought,
Well, how can I take dystopia and sort of flip it upside down?
Uh,
well, maybe a utopian story.
But then utopia doesn't exist.
I mean,
there's no such thing.
So I kind of called it an anti-dystopia story,
a story that is not about the world gone wrong,
but about the consequences of what happens when the world goes right.
When we achieve all the things we legitimately want to achieve as a
society,
what happens and how do we deal with those consequences?
One of the consequences was immortality.
The more research I did,
the more I realised we were moving towards that.
And so when we're immortal,
what happens to you know,
the world?
There's overpopulation.
Uh,
people will still have to die if nature is no longer taking care of that were left doing it.
So I thought,
Well,
what is the least dystopian way of us taking over
death?
And I thought of all these different things.
You know, the,
uh,
computers make the decision as to who lives who dies.
No,
that's too dystopian.
Uh,
the government decides.
No,
that's even worse.
So I thought.
Well, you know,
in a perfect world,
the Jedi would decide, the Jedi of death.
What would the Jedi of death be like?
And that evolved into the concept of Scythe
So we've got this world where there are Scythes
Who are the people who decide who dies.
Each Scythe has a method for who they kill and how they kill,
But they can't glean with bias.
They have to stick to these.
certain commandments.
They almost feel like judges.
They wear these long robes as well.
They can't have property. People
obviously they are like walking on eggshells every time they encounter them.
And because they can't have property,
they basically get given things for free.
So they walk into a shop.
People would see that their side they go Oh,
of course you know you can.
You can take these. No worries,
no cost for you.
They also change their name.
When they become a Scythe
they take the name of a historical person that they admire.
And in the first place,
the story is about so Citra and Rowan
who are too young people who basically get selected by the Honourable Scythe
Faraday to become his apprentice is also to become a Scythe
You kind of have to be a person who doesn't really want to be a Scythe for obvious reasons.
And these two going through their training is how we get introduced to the
world of the Scythes
The story takes you to so many places you get to learn about the history.
The society like the whole side of the world that,
like normal people,
don't get to see.
There is corruption.
There are all these different subgroups in society,
and you basically get taken on this massive,
massive adventure that goes so far beyond.
I think anything I imagined when I first started reading the books.
But I think the best way to talk about a series is just to pull out some of the things that
really defines it,
like what makes it special?
What are the things that you should know about?
So what is the favourite thing about the series?
For like most readers who love these books,
I'm going to let Neal himself take this question.
A lot of people have really said that the world building is their favourite part of my
writing.
The world's feel complete,
which is what I'm trying to do.
It's such a vast world.
There's so much to it.
But I think because of how the series is built up,
you spend a lot of that first book slowly being
introduced to it,
and then it really kicks off.
I think in book two. This book series has its own fandom,
wiki,
which is so extensive,
and I think that really says something about a series when fans love it so much.
I want to know so much about the world and have questions about it that they build a whole fan
wiki.
Then the other thing that I always talk about when I mentioned this series is the plot
twists.
I don't think I've ever read any other series where the plot twists are so
unpredictable.
Totally take me off guard.
There's just some jaw dropping moments,
but what I love about it as well is that they all make sense when they happen.
You go,
Oh yes,
OK, I can see why it's taken this turn.
But as I was reading,
I just didn't know where it was going next,
and I couldn't have predicted those plot twists and that is one of the things I absolutely love about
it. How do you go about creating your plot twists?
Plot twists always surprised me.
I don't think they wouldn't be twists if they didn't because it would have been predictable.
But sometimes the characters come up with things that I was not expecting.
And that's very exciting when your character is really come to life and start taking the story in directions
that you didn't plan.
I mean,
initially,
I start with an entire outline,
but I don't stick to that outline because the characters always veer away from it.
And I don't want to force them to stick with something,
because then they won't feel like real characters anymore.
They won't feel like real people.
So when the characters come up with things,
I always jump on it and then rearrange the story reworked the story based on the decisions that
the characters are making.
A good example of that is in the first book between
Citra and Rowan,
when they are when they are presented to the sites at Conclave as apprentices.
I was sort of building the story up to that moment,
and then once I was there,
I realised I didn't quite know what was going to come next and how where it was going to go from
there.
Then I sort of put myself in the mind of Scythe Goddard,
who is kind of the bad guy,
and I realised he would throw a monkey wrench into this.
He would try to figure out the best way to mess it up,
and he's smart,
so he is going to really figure out a good way to do it.
And I realised,
What if he puts them in mortal competition with one another,
and suddenly that just transformed the entire story?
And that wasn't something that I initially planned.
It was something that God came up with to mess with the characters,
and the story just took off from there.
Now the titular Thunderhead of Book two is what you could
call a benevolent AI, artificial intelligence.
It was created in the year 2042.
They took all the information from the Internet and the cloud and then added an AI onto
it.
It cannot interfere with the world of the sides,
and in the second book you kind of get these little moments these little monologues in between chapters
from the Thunderhead directly.
And this is how the second book opens.
How fortunate am I among the sentient to know my purpose.
I serve humankind.
I am the child who has become the parent creation that's fires towards
creator.
I am,
by definition pure justice.
Pure loyalty.
This world is a flower I hold in my palm.
I would end my own existence rather than crush it.
The reason why I decided to tell a story that included a benevolent AI is because
AI is happening.
I mean, artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly.
We don't know what's going to happen with it.
And there's a lot of fear about how it could go wrong.
I mean, you have stories like The Matrix and Terminator.
It always seems that the AI always turns bad because we can't
imagine something with that much power,
uh,
not being corrupted.
So I set out to sort of create a an artificial intelligence that had all of our
wisdom and all of our knowledge,
but without any of our flaws.
And I realised I had never quite seen that before and really
trying to explore this entity that is nothing but benevolent and wants nothing but the
best for us.
It was almost like we created this artificial god that is struggling to
find its place in the universe.
And I thought that was that was poetic and and really interesting to explore.
And I think another quite obvious thing about the series that is so great is that it really makes you think it makes you
think about corruption,
society,
humanity,
what does death mean?
What is your view on death?
And how would that change if people became immortal?
If you became a Scythe
how would you see death?
How would you approach something like that?
And all the Scythes do approach it very differently.
It's all about human nature,
and getting in the head of these different characters,
I think, is fascinating.
And then I've got some good news.
If you are interested in cults and religion,
because there is a very own religion in this world that was created in the
post mortal world,
and it's called Tonism,
And they loathe the Scythes
They don't believe in gleaning.
They think it's unnatural and their symbol is the tuning fork, that might be related
to the cover of the third book without giving any spoilers.
I think fictional religions or called in books are fascinating.
So the moment I realised that that was a part of that world,
I absolutely loved it.
A lot of trilogies suffer from that second book drop
off.
You get an amazing introduction in the first book.
Then in the third book,
you know everything is resolved.
There is like a big confrontation and then the book in the middle.
Very often,
characters are kind of,
you know,
waiting and observing,
and not much happens.
And I think what's really interesting about this series is that for me in book two,
things get ramped up so much you discover so many new things you get taken to
new places.
The ending of Book two is quite something,
and so I love that it really just carries you through the series in that way,
As I was talking to Neal,
I was also very curious about what he thinks defines his writing
style.
I think my writing style is defined by trying to sort of break the conventions
of the genre.
Uh,
I'm always trying to find new ways of doing things,
telling new stories that haven't been seen before.
I mean,
you know, every story has been seen before,
but trying to find new interpretations of familiar
tropes,
uh,
trying to take,
take them and sort of flip them so we can see it in a different way,
uh,
and always sort of keeping readers on their toes.
So for these videos,
I also want to include a little section that is the,
You know,
this series might not be for you if because I think,
not every series is for everyone,
and that is part of the decision making process.
So I think,
as he said himself,
if you don't enjoy the
thinking about society and thinking about humanity and things like that and you just want an
adventure,
then this might not be for you.
A lot of what I got out of this series is that aspect of
it.
There is a lot of adventure.
It is very fast paced.
There are lots of plot twists,
but if you don't enjoy that sort of observational or
active reading,
then this might not be the right series for you and then quite an obvious one if you're not
super into dystopian or utopian worlds.
Also, I think if you're looking for heavy romance plot,
there are a lot of YA
dystopian series where that is a huge part of the series and takes up a
lot of the plot.
There is perhaps a little bit of romance in here,
but if that is one of the main things you're looking for,
then you will not get that in this series.
And then the series might also not be for you.
If you don't think you will read them quite close together.
I don't think you have to read them all back to back,
especially between one and two.
It's really easy to pick it up again.
I would suggest reading Books two and three quite close together,
as there is a lot that happens.
And if you don't read Book three that soon to book to,
you might need to do some catching up on the plot again.
There are actually extremely detailed summaries on the size fandom wiki,
which was very helpful for me as well,
so you can go back and read that and then you're totally up to date,
but I would suggest reading those a little bit closer together if you can.
I do want to give a little shout out to Gleanings as well,
especially because it's just come out.
If you have read this series already and we're just watching this out of curiosity,
go onto this one.
I wouldn't suggest reading this first.
I think you get the most out of it if you've read.
The series immediately took me back to all my favourite bits.
So it was really fun to read this as I was prepping this video and I wanted to include a final
word from Neil as well.
We talked a little bit about Gleanings when I did the Unwind series
I finished it off with a collection of short stories within the unwind world because I just wasn't ready to leave that
world yet.
I decided to do the same thing with the world of Scythe
so I did Gleanings,
which is 13 stories that are in the world of sight.
They answer a lot of questions that fans had.
For instance,
fans asked,
Do pets get to live forever in the world of Scythe, well
I didn't answer that in the series,
but I was able to write a story that deals with pets,
also to explore origin stories of some of the characters that you love
and love to hate.
Like Scythe Goddard.
What was he like when he was a creepy 16 year old and Scythe Curie,
Who was she when she first became a Scythe?
So I had a lot of fun with these stories,
and five of them are co written with other authors,
which was really great to be able to bring other authors into the world of Scythe.
I really enjoyed doing this.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about Scythe and by by huge thanks to
Walker books for working on this video with me.
I had the series planed for quite a long time.
Then this opportunity to talk to Neal Shusterman come up,
and I thought this would be the perfect collaboration.
Obviously,
thanks to Neal for talking to me and thanks to Books on the Hill for letting us film in their beautiful reading
rooms,
I think for the next video in this series,
I either want to do the Old Kingdom by Garth Nix or
the Grishaverse by Leigh Bardugo Let me know if you have a preference for
that. Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed it.
If you end up picking up Scythe after you've watched this and you finish it,
please come back and let me know Having recommended books on the Internet for so long,
sometimes people will come back like 345 years later and say,
Oh, I read this book because you recommended it and like,
2012,
and it never stops bringing me joy.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you soon,
Doei!