Repent, Harlequin!, Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison is a metaphor against an over-reglemented world. It's pretty old, and I'm afraid to my eyes it hasn't aged too well. I totally agree with the message, and the scenario isn't bad either, and the language is poetic, but it didn't capture me at all. Maybe something got due to me not being a native speaker, though.
I liked Ready Player One (and remember, three stars means 'liked it', not 'meh').
It immerses you in a dystopic future where humanity takes to a huge Virtual Reality to flee their problems (dwindling oil reserves mean poverty, starvation, slums everywhere). We join a young protagonist on his quest for the hugest in-game Easteregg ever.
Its flaws lie mostly within its highly predictable storyline: <spoiler>Boy (default geek all with social anxiety and great reflexes) finds friends and goals, loses all of them, then regains all of it by growing up and sticking to what is good and right.</spoiler> Urgh.
Also, logical flaws: Not using proper data science and cross-referencing to solve riddles? Please, that's what every mega-corp would do! There are some instances of less-well thought out behavior like that, sometimes breaking the immersion for me.
But apart from the kind of boring overall plot, this book shines with creativity and a huge lot of 80s culture. Loved the references, loved the attention to detail<spoiler>, loved the fact that the protagonist's best friend turned out to be a black chick (using a white guys avatar because duuuh, what do you think?) and nobody is bothered</spoiler>.
It's kind of a feel-good book: A simple, predictable plot with lots of love to detail, enough sophistication in characters so that you actually want the good guys to win<spoiler>, and feel good when they do</spoiler>.
The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov explores a world in which computers are everywhere, and humans have forgotten how to do anything by themselves, especially calculations. Not a novel concept, you may say, but the publication date is 1958. I'm completely undecided on if this has aged astonishingly well or has been made unreadable, but I'd say take the five minutes and read it regardless.
The Will to Battle is currently the last volume of Ada Palmer's brilliant Terra Ignota series. One volume is missing, and it's supposed to come out next year, and I bloody hope so because this one leaves me aching for more. As with the previous books, I completely get why people would not like this book, at least its style, but to me it's magical. Even three books into the series, we get an astounding amount of worldbuilding, we receive new information on the previous books (in particular their creation, it's all Very Meta), all the while the world heads straight towards the biggest and worst World War imaginable. I love these books dearly, and the world Ada Palmer shows us is filled with wonders.
Distress is another really enjoyable book by Greg Egan, part of his very loosely connected Subjective Cosmology trilogy. It's less "weird" than the other two parts, and might make a better starting point for interested readers. We accompany our protagonist, a scientific journalist, to a phyics conference on an anarchist island – less happens than in th other books, but that just finally leaves room for better characters and characterisations. The whole book, especially its increasingly twisty story arch, is very recommendable scifi.
Wild Seed (first part of Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series) was good, but not great. She experiments with the implication of mortal and immortal characters, who definitely aren't gods, and while I enjoyed the premise, and the writing, and the characters immensely, I felt that the story meandered a bit and didn't quite know where to go. It was still a very pleasant read, and I'm looking forward to see in which direction the series develops. (After finishing the book, I was told that I had started the series in the chronological order, not the published order, which was not at all my intention, and may contribute to my impression of a vague plot.)
Didn't finish, writing style didn't appeal to me at all, though this might be an issue with my language skills.