Sometime in the not-so-distant future, The United Safer States of America imprisons twenty-four percent of its population for breaking any number of laws, including Road Rage, saying mean things to others, and drinking alcohol. Bo Marsden has had a history of anger management “issues” and has landed himself in a work camp, where he makes frozen pizzas. The camp’s warden has a great deal of nostalgia for the old days when football was still legal, and Bo manages to get on the prison team. For the first time in his life, he is allowed to run without wearing safety padding and a helmet, just like his grandpa used to do. It’s terrifying, and it’s liberating . . . sort of. To be truly free, Bo needs to break out of the confines of camp, and, more important, the confines of his own mind. As often as he has found himself in trouble for violating the laws, it’s never occurred to Bo that there might be something wrong with the reasoning behind them. In a hilarious satire, Pete Hautman imagines a world where safety and conformity are more important than liberty and creativity. (Age 12 and older)

"Of course, without people like us Marstens, there wouldn't be anybody to do the manual labor that makes this country run. Without penal workers, who would work the production lines, or pick the melons and peaches, or maintain the streets and parks and public lavatories? Our economy depends on prison labor. Without it everybody would have to work -- whether they wanted to or not."

In the late twenty-first century Bo Marsten is unjustly accused of a causing a rash that plagues his entire high school. He loses it, and as a result, he's sentenced to work in the Canadian tundra, at a pizza factory that's surrounded by hungry polar bears. Bo finds prison life to be both boring and dangerous, but it's nothing compared to what happens when he starts playing on the factory's highly illegal football team. In the meantime, Bork, an artificial intelligence that Bo created for a science project, tracks Bo down in prison. Bork has spun out of control and seems to be operating on his own. He offers to get Bo's sentence shortened, but can Bo trust him? And now that Bo has been crushing skulls on the field, will he be able to go back to his old, highly regulated life?

Pete Hautman takes a satirical look at an antiseptic future in this darkly comic mystery/adventure.