ot far from the sprawling urban conglomeration known as San Angeles, in the year 2036, a 125-story tower rises from the desert landscape. This is the Stansbury School, home to 4,000 overachieving wonder-kids from grades 1 through 12. Founded in 2009, the Stansbury School has produced several generations of miracle children, their brains and bodies modified by heavy doses of drugs. The Stansbury alums now run many of the world's top corporations and have racked up numerous Nobel Prizes and patented many brilliant inventions. So popular, famous and powerful has the school become that the U.S. Congress is preparing to authorize a trillion dollars a year for its maintenance and extension.
One would think, then, that the current crop of seniors would be sitting on top of the world. But a disquiet flows through the class. Many of the kids are taking illegal drugs on top of their authorized regimen to dull their sense of anomie. They feel their childhoods have been stolen, leaving them soulless genius automatons. The head rabble-rouser is a fellow named William Winston Cooley. He and his clique, including his girlfriend Sadie, stand in opposition to their peers who have totally bought into the school's program, peers like valedictorian Thomas Oliver Goldsmith and second-ranked Camilla Moore.
With graduation only a few days away, it would seem that the two camps could tolerate and ignore each other until they went their adult ways. But then Cooley, during an illegal off-campus visit to the apartment of an alum named Riley, witnesses Riley's murder—at the hands of the Stansbury School security force, headed by the deadly Captain Gibson. Suddenly, the façade of the school is ripped away to reveal a malignant conspiracy, headed by the school's president, Judith Lang.
The deadly knowledge in Cooley's possession means he's next on the hit list. Unless he can convince his most unlike ally, Goldsmith, to come to his aid. But even together, how will the two mismatched students know whom among their fellow students they can trust?
The education of generation next
In her seminal 1953 fix-up, Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras created a powerful narrative template: a school for superkids. Influencing series from the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes right down to Harry Potter, Shiras' notion of portraying the proper education of a posthuman awoke an instant response from SF readers. Dave Kalstein is evidently one of those who vibrates in sympathy to this trope, since he's buffed up the old vehicle, souped up its narrative engine and now roars out of the starting gate at top speed.
One of Kalstein's refreshenings is the manner in which his students achieve their superhumanity. There's no accidental mutation or otherworldliness involved—not even any genetic engineering. It's 100 percent designer drugs. How apt for the "real year" of the book's composition. A recent article in The New York Times details the experimental "self-medication" habits of Generations X, Y and Z, and Kalstein's placidly drug-popping "specimens" are merely one small step away from this contemporary reality.
The second major reinvigoration of this conceit stems from the lessons of three additional decades of teen fiction and sitcoms and dramedies. For Shiras, adolescence was a Saturday Evening Post idyll, part Andy Hardy, part Archie and Jughead. Kalstein's kids reflect The O.C., Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson's Creek and a dozen other media models. Catty girls, swaggering guys, their banter and bickerings—all embody a late-20th-century adolescent reality—or at least the media representation of such.
This aligns with something we learn from Kalstein's brief bio, which labels him a "film writer and director." In fact, although this book is not exclusively cinematic in its presentation (novelistic infodumps and backstories are used creatively and judiciously), there are many moments where the reader can only say, "This is staged for the best screen presentation." This is not necessarily a drawback to enjoyment of the slam-bang narrative, but it does intrude at times, especially in such moments as when Goldsmith and Cooley have to create an unlikely diversion to get into President Lang's office. It results in great visual moments, but even their fellow characters are forced to concede that, logically speaking, the plot is "far-fetched" and "insane."
But taken all in all, Kalstein's book addresses serious issues about how far society is willing to go in grooming the next generation ("Is a cure for cancer worth a thousand childhoods?") with genuine speculative brio (although I'm still not convinced drugs can be delivered through "laser syringes") and zesty plot twists. His "perfect" children all emerge as uniquely human, proving that an ineradicable core of contrariness is humanity's best resource.
