Il romanzo è una distopia per ragazzi ambientata in un futuro non specificato in cui gli esseri umani hanno posto fine alle guerre dividendosi autonomamente in fazioni e svolgendo ognuno il mestiere più consono alle proprie naturali inclinazioni. 

The genre first emerged in the eighteenth century—many credit Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the first semi-dystopian novel—and has since spawned a wide range of works by prominent science fiction authors such as H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Ray Bradbury. Dystopian fiction proliferated throughout the twentieth century in the works of such authors as Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess, and Margaret Atwood, and became a favored genre of young-adult writers in the early twenty-first century.