Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn

To her, his job began and ended with supplying rich, empty people with poor, desperate victims. She only looked at the negative side of his job--never saw the good side, the kindness and help it let him give....the dust addicts who wanted and needed another chance; the working people who had sunk all their earnings into paying for the memory crystals; the victims of disease whose bodies were no more than mockeries of the human form; none of them would have had any hope of reconstruction if it weren't for procurers. Someone's collection of 1970s and 1980s SF paperbacks ended up at the Goodwill in Middletown, MD, and I recently came upon it. Lots of Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson, as well as other authors you've heard of, solid representatives of the respectable mainstream of SF, both the pinko end of the spectrum and the libertarian end, people who care about science, history, economics, politics, and actually know about that stuff. Not to take anything away from Pohl or Anderson, I found…