@Kara,
I finished reading/listening to the class nightmare of
Never Let Me Go by
Kazuo Ishiguro. Most definitely not a work that falls under the genre of science fiction but it couldn't exist without the concept of clonings and organ donations. And no that isn't a spoiler as it's well known plot point that's pretty much openly discussed in the first several chapters of the book.
The book revolves around 3 lifelong childhood friends of the Hailsham Boarding School where an entire subclass of human clones go through schooling so they can inevitably donate their organs to whomever wealthy enough had commissioned the government to farm them in the first place.
And as it's put in the NY Times review:
Quote:here is no way around revealing the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel. It is brutal, especially for a writer celebrated as a poet of the unspoken. But it takes a while for us to get a handle on it. Since it's the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don't quite know what's going on.
We have inklings. The novel's 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for more than 11 years as a ''carer.'' The people she assists in her line of work are ''donors'' at a recovery center, in pain and doped up on drugs. Logic suggests that bodily organs are involved. But gently decent Kathy is our host on this journey, and instead of surveying her life in the present (that would be ''England, late 1990's,'' according to an introductory note) she likes to let her mind wander back to the years she spent with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school -a fabled, bucolic place in the countryside with the Dickens-parody name of Hailsham.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17KERRL.html
I hope people don't dismiss this book as some kind of retro-horror novel because its the relationships of the 3 main characters that make up the novel.
This book is the most painful because the protagonists are too naive and too accepting to their destined fate. The book is about their coping and surviving and finding out what life is meant to be when one knows one's condemned fate at such a young age.
I can not recommend it highly enough.
