@socketwench can I drop a Minneapolis-local author recommendation?

If you haven't read her stuff, Lyda Morehouse is fun. The first book or so in the LINK Angels series is kinda hetero-Christian tame, but her worldbuilding is phenomenal. She's a lesbian and writes a lot of romance, mostly straight, and she's really nice.

The LINK Angel series is set in a cyberpunk theocracy with narrative themes of AI sovereignty/identity, the 'rest of the world' when the US and Europe do things, plus some gender-deviant angels (cw: there's some misgendering) and some remarkably cool hackers. It's really fun. The first book in the series is Archangel Protocol.