I've been rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a formative text for me back when I was a nerdy teenager in the late Nineties, but one which I haven't touched in a decade or so.

A lot of it has already been obsoleted by real technological and social changes; its China for example transitioned directly from Maoism to neo-Confucianism without an authoritarian market economy stage, staying well behind the technological bell curve in the process, and its approach to AI is looking increasingly quaint. From a psychology/cogsci/poli-sci point of view I imagine it'd still be a deeply interesting book for many LW readers, though. The motivations behind its Primer closely approximate some of the ways we talk about rationality, for one thing

Unfortunately a lot of the interesting bits edge into politics, so I'm not sure I feel comfortable unleashing my usual rambling screed in this context.