Galactic North

John Harrison’s The Centauri Device,

of Iain M. Banks.

Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers.

Marshall T. Savage’s book The Millennial Project, which

Joan D. Vinge wrote about a demarchist society in her enjoyable pacey novel The Outcasts of Heaven Belt.

to Samuel R. Delaney’s seminal Nova.

Gregory Benford, especially his ‘Galactic Centre’ sequence, beginning with In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns.

Read Schismatrix if you haven’t already done so: it will melt your face.

Bruce Sterling, whose ‘Shaper/Mechanist’ sequence