Toll

Neal Shusterman

Book 3 in Arc of a Scythe trilogy

The conclusion, following Scythe and Thunderhead. Scythes Lucifer and Anastasia are stuck in a vault at the bottom of the ocean after the sinking of Scythe capital Endura. New Order sociopath Goddard has taken over the Scythedom. Simultaneously, Thunderhead has designated everyone unsavory (and therefore unavailable for communication) save one, who becomes Toll (effectively a cult leader). While the first two installments were interesting as an AI-coming-of-age story, here we have a separation of church and state, burgeoning fascist state story. The development of Thunderhead takes a back seat (although still pivotal) role. I wonder if the story was always planned this way, or if Shusterman is writing to be relevant in 2019 U.S. The reason I have to wonder is because it is not obvious. The story works, and does not feel put on. It is part of this continuous character development. I like the pacifist nods, but also recognize that it is really pretty "just war pacifism". I like the struggle with mortality and meaning. I love that this is a quality trilogy (not just strong 1 & 3) and Shusterman maintains his strength of fascinating worlds that speak to important social topics.

4 stars (out of 4)

The Resisters

 Gish Jen

The Circle meets The Brothers K. Set in the near future where civilization is run by artificial intelligences (referred to as Aunt Nettie in Autoamerica) and the major geopolitical tension is between Autoamerica and Chinrussia. In this world, there are basically two social classes, the Netted and the Surplus. Since Aunt Nettie has so vastly improved the efficiency of production, most workers are no longer necessary. But to do their part, the Surplus have consumption goals to help utilize all the production that the Netted produce. Into this setting, our protagonist is Gwen, a Surplus girl who finds that she has a gift for pitching. The story follows her development as a pitcher, getting called up to the Netted leagues and with scholarship to NetU, and the manipulative ways that Aunt Nettie arranges to coerce her along the way. So while Aunt Nettie is terrifying (in that Jen describes the technology so that we can see that it is much nearer-term than we like to admit), the baseball storyline throughout is brilliant. A couple of really enjoyable pieces to look forward to include (since I listened to this on audio, read by William DeMeritt) is his voicing of the "house", and Jen's "name branding" of tasks. Can't recommend this enough.

4 stars (out of 4)

The Raven

Ann Leckie

A story where the narrator is a god, and an ancient god at that. In fact, it is two stories. The first person account of the god's experience over history in discovering its self-identity and learning to interact with people, and a specific event story about a town in political transition where the actions of the gods is integral. This definitely gave me American Gods vibes, but was way better. I loved the development of identity of the god. How it discovered that it had power, and how that power worked. By definition, anything that a god proclaims must be true. So, the god must be careful to only say true things or, if a statement of fact is made that is not currently true, it will then become true. This is the creation process of sorts. For example, if a god says "All trees are made of metal", it is clearly not true now. So the in order to keep the god status, trees become made of metal. And the amount of power that this requires must be taken into account. Likely this statement would actually kill the god, since turning all trees to metal would take more power than the god has available. So you can see that it is tricky being a god, and takes great care in what is said. With this line of thinking about how gods work, it does allow for an interesting thought experiment about the Christian creation story. Perhaps God was not "creating" most of the time, but stating already true facts about the universe?

While this may seem like a genre departure for Leckie from her space opera Imperial Radch Trilogy (which I loved), it in fact has many themes that overlap. As a reader, I was thinking about power and responsibility, and challenged with my preconceptions about gender throughout. Leckie may be one of my favorite authors.

4 stars (out of 4)