Book Report

I just finished a book about human organ harvesting. It's a popular topic. There have been movies about it and a lot of books.

This one had the bad guys trying to follow Plato's Republic, with the bad guys playing the part of the Guardians. The other two castes were Producers and Auxiliaries. You could Google Plato's Republic and see how this plays out.

The bad guy Guardians were all doctors...transplantation specialists who figured that since they were the ones who did the transplantations, they should have the major say in who got the new organs. There's some merit to this notion, or at the very least, nothing really objectionable to the idea. But that quickly evolved into deciding that if X deserved a transplant, he should get it as soon as possilbe, meaning they had to find and kill a matching donor to get the needed organs. Very logical, if you're monomanical.

The protagonists were three disparate souls, two of whom fall in love. The third, having received the lung of one of the first two, gives back the lung and makes them real Guardians. It was a fun read: The Fifth Vial by Michael Palmer.