Scythe

Scythe is a young adult novel by the American writer Neal Shusterman, published in 2016 and the first book of the Arc of a Scythe series. It is set in a future in which death, disease and unhappiness have been almost eliminated by technology, and a benevolent artificial intelligence manages most human affairs.

Because people no longer die on their own, the population has to be controlled, and that work is given to scythes, who decide who will be gleaned. Citra and Rowan are chosen as apprentices to a scythe who believes the job should be painful to perform, and their training sets them against each other in a way neither of them chose, while the novel asks what a person can be asked to do on behalf of everyone else.

Shusterman writes the series as a moral problem dressed as a thriller, and the two apprentices carry both sides of it. It was followed by further volumes, and the first book ends with the pair in very different positions.