I love Ian's Culture series. He clearly had a good mind and knowledgeable experiences with technology, in order to write about it so capably. And just as interesting, he clearly had a solid, hands on understand of the liberal end of the spectrum of political thought, from liberal-capitalist straight through to the various forms of anarchism. His books clearly played with those concepts in the environment of a post-scarcity society.

I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world.

Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.