Thank you. I believe Golden Age is the series I was trying to remember in a conversation a few weeks ago as an example of extreme use of augmented reality.

I'll toss in my recent favorite space opera: the Polity series by Neal Asher. Similar to Banks in that it has governing AIs, but less omniscient; good adventure stories, with a dash of horror in original hostile species, sentient and otherwise.

I'll 2nd Asher. Just read the prologue of Gridlinked. On par with Game of Thrones.

There's something I actually quite like about strange, dated sci-fi. I'll admit I really have only one strong example of it, and that is Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, but there's something fantastic about a world where information technology is scary and foreign, a world of digital phone booths and fax-newspapers, in which the internet is pervasive and deep, yet in other ways clunky and limited. It's a future arrived at by an alternate-present.

I accidentally happened across the series and couldn't put it down. It explores some of the densest philosophical implications of technology I can recall. Vast arenas, complex growing characters, implications in the concepts that don't hit you for weeks after reading it.

I was particularly struck by the concepts that came from the Atkins character, as the sole entity in the universe's military. The magnificent display of unbelievable power, not as planet cracking explosives, but weapons so precise that individual neurons could be severed from orbit, altering the course of entire conflicts. And the idea of the weaponry and strategy, though controlled by godlike machine minds, still needed the ok of a person to do the precision strike.

The only real weakness I felt was the Daphne character, she was flat, uninteresting and almost misogynistic in her treatment as an unbelievable ignorant and foolish female character. I found myself aggravated during her sections of the work, this stupid character in the midst of such magnificently crafted, almost baroque, prose and ideas.

Both Hamilton's _Pandora's Star_ and Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ are "Modern" sci-fi (though, definitely not hard sci-fi) where computing and networking are important to the story. The plot being A Fire Upon the Deep involves travelling to a planet lacking modern technology and the changes that brings.