Galactic North

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

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

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

John Varley,

Bruce Sterling, whose ‘Shaper/Mechanist’ sequence

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

Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’

John Harrison’s The Centauri Device,

‘Eight Worlds’ stories before writing Steel Beach.