4 ⭐ CW: medical content, sex, animal cruelty 

The Heart of the Chimera by Leslie J. Linder is a Biopunk scifi novella. I received a free arc of this book in exchange for an honest review. This is the second book I've read by this author, but this one is a very different vibe from the vampire novel I read.  This was an intense, but quick read.

We follow Lianna in 2035, a vegan who had a heart transplant when she was a kid. By 2035 most people are using lab grown meat instead of killing livestock as a more humane alternative. Lianna and her girlfriend Stella are committed vegans that tend to get into it with Lianna's family about their consumption of meat. Lianna starts having weirdly vivid dreams of being a pig in a breeding facility and enduring horrible pain, discomfort, fear, despair. She thinks there has to be more to it than just dreams, so she does research and looks into animal research to see if it is connected to her heart transplant. 

Lianna finds that she was unknowingly part of a clinical trial at ten years old, where she donated genetic material for a bio tech company to be able to grow human organs inside pigs for organ transplants. Turns out she got a heart grown inside a pig like the ones she was dreaming of. Lianna is horrified, and with Stella's help, plans a heist. 

This story definitely had strong themes about animal ethics and rights. It grapples with the question of who has more right to life. Is it the humans, because they are cruel or the animals who feel things just as intently as humans? It's an indictment of the meat industrial complex and the practice of using animals for medical research. Linder gets us to think critically about how we treat other living things, and our complicity in allowing abhorrent conditions and treatment of animals to happen. The plight of the hogs grips you and makes you root for the people who are considered extreme activists.