Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson is a chunky DQ Blizzard blended up from berries, lychee, and wax jambu fruit.  Or in literary terms, it's a Scifi / cyberpunk / satire / adventure story with an enormous enthusiasm for a turn of phrase.  So I liked it.  (Standard advice:  look in Amazon or Wikipedia to learn more about the book itself.  And ignore the theology/history lessons... it's fiction!)

This is the first book I've read that was set in a 'world' that felt like it was just like a tall pile of dry sand... in a critical state, where a single grain falling would cause a small landslip, if not a collapse of the whole pile.  The degree of randomness and sense of multipoint interaction (mostly off screen, as it were) helped to create this, but also the lack of broad internal legal-political-economic consistency in the semi-collapsed burbclave-franchise ghetto-Fed America-Raft and Metaverse dominated world.  The whole plot hangs together like a Reason (depleted uranium needle railgun) blasted yacht... that is, just barely, with imminent collapse a distinct possibility.  And this adds to the fun.

It is possible that the method that one might use to construct such a world would be to take subunits of a societal system and give them independence, but ignore all the trade/finance/defense etc. consequences of such independence.  Perhaps there exists (or could exist) good scifi premised on crafts (lightspeed drive mechanics) guilds being essentially independent nations... with a small territory (perhaps an asteroid somewhere), and all of the nationals serving as expats everywhere else.  Or lose the idea of territory as the basis of nationality entirely, and go with something else, like IQ score or language fluency.  Consider that nations may only exist to defend citizens from other citizens and to engage in common good projects.  Corps and commerce can do the latter (for user fees); perhaps nations aren't needed in a world with sufficiently advanced personal defense systems?