The Blade Runner

This is the book from which Ridley Scott pinched the movie title instead of using 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.

In a future dystopian society (imagine the same world as the Blade Runner movie - rich/poor divide, flying taxis etc) health care is only granted to people with little illness impact. If you get sick too often, or if your illness has a genetic link you only get health care by agreeing to sterilization. After all, if we manage your diabetes you'll then pass on the genes to your kids and then we manage their illness and the genes pass into a widening pool of people until everyone is diabetic.

Of course there is resistance to this by the population and medical personnel, and underground medical practices spread through the under parts of the city. Regular doctors work nights doing surgeries on kitchen tables in patient's homes. But where do they get instruments etc for that work? Bladerunners are couriers between black market suppliers and the doctors. Billy Gimp is a bladerunner.

Throw into the mix a community of hotheads called the Naturists who deny all medical intervention, either legal or underground, "as God intended". And those guys can get violent. Then imagine a potentially fatal air-borne respiratory virus that reaches epidemic proportions and something has to give.

Reading this 1974 story so soon after covid and all the 'stuff' that hit the fan in those years was more than a little ironic.