Thoughts on "Shinsekai Yori"

-SPOILERS-

A millennium in the future, humankind has developed psychokinesis. The world has been ravaged by weapons of mass destruction and ecological breakdown. On the Japanese archipelago, people survive in villages which are cordoned off by a Holy Barrier. Safe inside the barrier, these communities are seemingly free of hunger, pestilence and strife.

However, there is always a flipside to utopia. Everyone in the villages are able to wield psychokinesis which awakens when they are ten years of age. After that, children are taught through hypnosis and lessons to adhere to a set of prescribed values and conditioned to recoil from death, something known as death feedback. The children are closely monitored for any signs of abnormality or weakness - a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. If they exhibit signs of mental instability or have problems controlling their psychokinesis (called Cantus), they are secretly disposed of and a clean-up follows to get rid of any evidence that the aberrant every existed at all.

Society is essentially divided between human who possess Cantus and small, ugly creature called a queerat. They look like bald rodents and the tallest ones stand about 4 ft but most of them are squat, short and do not speak human language. These queerats live in highly structured societies similar to ant colonies where the queen's sole task is to reproduce and the workers tend to the resources and the state of their warren.