The novel shows a dystopian early 21st-century America dominated by computer networks, and is considered by some critics to be an early ancestor of the cyberpunk genre. The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a oligarchy whose beneficiaries are members of organised crime.