Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars

I'm rereading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, starting once again with the first book, Red Mars. I have never encountered science fiction like this before. Some of its chapters not only talk about technological change, but social change as well. It is like a book on utopia in the garb of science fiction, essentially creating a new society in another place. Despite the fantastic setting, the issues are strikingly relevant to the here and now. Here's a short exchange between characters to give you a better idea, it's about ec0-economics:

"The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in... In the classic sense of passing along calories to one's predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of the food chains did more like five percent."
"This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient."
"So tigers don't have predators not because they are so tough, but because it's not worth the effort," John said.
"Exactly!"
"The problem is in calculating the values," Marina said. "We have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there."
"But we are talking about economics?" John said.
"But this is economics, don't you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use-this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecological basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South."
"They were predators on the South," John said.
"Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we let them. And like all predators their efficiency is low. But here, you see-in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of-" she grinned at John's look of consternation-"you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John-well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system."