Dan Simmons is an amazing writer. I could not stop devouring his 4 books of Hyperion. Not really "hard" SF, but it is SF all right, and brilliantly written.
Stephenson is called one of the founders of what became known as cyberpunk with his Cryptonomicon & Snow Crash. But my real love is Diamond Age that explorers not very distant future with penetrating nanotechnology and societies transformed from today countries into a mixture of geographic countries and quasi-state entities uniting people who want to be united (like Free Republic). All this as a background to the primary theme of education, family, love and sacrifice.
That's probably why I'm not familiar with any of his work.
I had trouble suspending my disbelief in Diamond Age. The economics of "The Feed" just didn't make sense. Here you have a technology that enables you to create arbitrary amounts of whatever, very cheaply...but somehow you still have economic rich and poor. What's the point of providing a halfway-capable Feed to "poor" people, other than to provide conflict for a story? (The sex-based information processing seemed highly inefficient, too.)
A better social analysis is to be found in Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. What do you get when you eliminate economic scarcity, and require nothing in return? You get a society full of really awful people. When you eliminate all poverty, do you get equality? No, you get people who have ability, and those who have it not.