Despite its ultimate focus on youth, we begin with the adults. The Mayor of our unnamed City is conducting a meeting in which he lays out his desire for tighter controls on the youthful population. A rebel movement known as the Truancy is active, killing Enforcers and causing damage to infrastructure. The Truancy seeks to end the daily mindless grind that prevails in the education system, a system where Expulsion equals death.

We next meet our protagonist, an average lad named Tack. Doing poorly at District 20 school, he yet lacks any real impetus to rebel. But all that changes when he ventures into the sealed-off wasteland of District 19. There he meets a charismatic fellow named Umasi. Umasi guides Tack to a maturity he lacks—a maturity that includes martial-arts skills and the deep philosophy to go with them.

But all Tack's new composure goes out the window when a Truancy assassination attempt spills over to hurt the one person he really loves, his sister Suzie. Tack vows to kill the boy responsible: Zyid, leader of the Truancy. Tack joins the rebels in disguise and works his way up to become Zyid's trusted right-hand man, replacing the former holder of that position, a girl named Noni, after a savage duel.

But Tack is going to find a lot of stumbling blocks in his way. The vital need to maintain his cover by following orders in Zyid's campaign against the adults. The plans Umasi has for Zyid. Tack's own quicksand emotions. And, finally, the arrival of Edward, a rogue acolyte of Umasi's, and his quisling Student Militia.

A young boy learns his lesson

Several years ago I was a judge for the Scholastic Writing Competition, an annual contest in which Isamu Fukui took an award. (Not the year I was judging, insofar as I recall.) Many of the entries submitted by the young writers were plainly modeled on video games or the latest cinematic hit or franchise fiction, rather than grander literary predecessors. It is to Fukui's immense credit that his novel—aside from some visible Matrix influences in the fight scenes—does not wear any of these pervasive generational influences on its sleeve. (Although the press kit for the book does mention that Fukui got some inspiration from Tolkien and a video game named Tales of Phantasia; but he has internalized these invisibly.)

But what is incredible about this book is that it harks back to a much, much older model, one that I would have thought would have been utterly out of vogue with a writer as young as Fukui: specifically, the 1950s Galaxy-style tale of a world run monolithically by a single corporation or clique. Advertisers, doctors, insurance companies—all these and more have served as autocrats for dystopias. And here, naturally, the school system plays that role.

The trouble with such worlds where there is a single center of political/economic/cultural power is that these depictions are flat and unreal. They do not resemble the fully worked-up future of a Heinlein or a Stross novel. At best, they can serve as reductio ad absurdum parables. At worst, you get something like Jerry Sohl's Point Ultimate (1955), famously trashed by Damon Knight.

Fukui's novel walks the middle line between the classic The Space Merchants (1953) and Sohl's farce. The rather simplistic points it does have to make are made with force and drama. But it's utterly shallow and neglectful in its analysis of what's really wrong with modern education. It fails to address student complicity in the system, or failures among the poorest students who don't even have the option to be overprogrammed and stressed like their well-off kin. Also, its determinedly retro future—where are any analogues to the cell phones and Twitter and Facebook that figure so prominently in the lives of young people today?—also renders irrelevant or stilted what it has to say.

But its inexplicably antiquated theme and message aside, Fukui exhibits a fair amount of sheer writerly skills. His prose is clean and vivid. His characterization is sharp (Umasi, an obvious egoboo anagram of the author's first name, comes off like Professor Xavier, while Zyid is Magneto), and his plotting propulsive. In Chapter 23 he pulls a sophisticated move, leaping over some crucial action to achieve suspense, and then narrating it in flashback.

In short, this book is a fine foundation for a long career. But how it will go down with a teen audience accustomed to, say, the sophisticated YA novels of Scott Westerfeld is the million-dollar question.