The Thunderhead does experience emotions, however. It comes from the scythedom-which is corruptible in a way that the Thunderhead is not. I had to fight against that impulse, because in this story, the AI truly is benevolent, and non-threatening. It’s also tempting to turn it into an evil force-which is what all stories seem to do with artificial intelligence. It’s tempting to have it be imperfect, but that would go against the whole premise. By definition, everything it does is the perfect action. First of all, it cannot have regrets, because it never makes mistakes. It doesn’t think like we do, and I had to keep that in mind in each segment that was in its point of view. I had to approach the Thunderhead very carefully. How did you approach channeling the voice and thought processes of a near-omnipotent artificial intelligence, one that’s responsible for running just about everything on Earth? No surprise, given the title, but readers get quite a bit of the Thunderhead’s perspective in this sequel. In book two, Thunderhead, Shusterman turns his attention to the powerful AI itself, as the machinations of power-hungry scythes threaten to upset the world order. Scythe, which received a Printz Honor, followed the training of two apprentice scythes, Rowan and Citra, amid political turmoil within the scythedom.

In order to keep population growth in check, an organization known as the scythedom was established, its members revered and feared for their duty to “glean” humans, one of the few ways a person can truly, irrevocably die. Technology has advanced to a point that poverty, crime, and even death itself have all but ceased to be concerns. In 2016, Neal Shusterman released Scythe, the first book in his Arc of a Scythe series, set on a future Earth governed by an artificial intelligence known as the Thunderhead.

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