Ian McDonald's _Brasyl_ is up there. Hard to find but worth it. Does suffer from the "quantum effects are magical pixie dust" disease but this can be overlooked

Ian McDonald's _Brasyl_ is up there. Hard to find but worth it. Does suffer from the "quantum effects are magical pixie dust" disease but this can be overlooked. Charlie Stross, _Glasshouse_. Yes, _Halting State_ is good too, but in _Glasshouse_ Stross manages to get his temptation to wink at the reader under control and as a result writes a classic. Has a funny throwaway bit about DRM, too: "For some reason the ancients encrypted all their records and threw away all the keys, that's why we don't know anything about them..." Ken MacLeod, _The Star Fraction_/_The Cassini Division_/_The Stone Canal_/_The Sky Road_ (Fall Revolution Series). Yes, there sure are a lot of Trotskyists! in! Spaaaaaace! but there's also serious exploration of how technological change affects social structures on the personal and political level. Overview from Reason magazine http://reason.com/archives/2000/11/01/anarchies-states-and-utopias http://reason.com/archives/2000/11/01/anarchies-states-and-u... and that's just things that unambiguously classify as SF. If you make things a little broader, then you can include novels like the 2008 Hugo winner, _The Yiddish Policeman's Union_, which is classic Michael Chabon applied to alt history.