4) The Phoenix Exultant, by John C. Wright
I read the first in this series, The Golden Age some time ago and quite enjoyed it. This second volume is also enjoyable – still the same dense writing, but our hero turns out to be pretty fallible on a human level and appears to learn and change as the book goes on, and Wright appears to be questioning the underside of his affluent networked society. Indeed at one point I almost hoped the book was going to turn into a series of vignettes of different groups functioning on the margins, but it turned out a bit different. Anyway, it was fun.
I first encountered O’Brien’s works via a 1970s Christmas edition of New Scientist, which reprinted as a stand-alone article the footnotes from The Third Policeman regarding that great scientist and independent thinker, de Selby.