Books like The Warlock in Spite of Himself

The book starts off as typical sci-fi/fantasy fodder: An undercover agent, Rodney Gallowglass, discovers an entire planet of earth-descended espers who cut off communications with their home planet centuries before. By the time Rodney finds them they've structured their civilization based on a medievel monarchy. Rodney's use of technology gets him branded as a wizard and he finds himself balanced between the monarchy and a large group of "witches" and "wizards" who are, in actuality, regular people with telekinetic, teleportation and mind-reading abilities.But then it gets interesting because Rodney finds himself battling to protect a monarchy that is slowly blossoming into a democracy against two factions, both from the future. One is comprised of Anarchists, the other, of Dictators. Both factions want the esper powers of the citizens at their disposal. The reason I liked this book was because 1.) Rod Gallowglass is a smartass. 2.) It examines the very interesting question of how a democracy forms and the myriad of ways any government can take a turn down any number of politically structured roads. And 3.) Rod's main sidekick is a robot named Fess who happens to have one gigantic flaw: when confronted with too much input or with input that he cannot logically assimilate, Fess has a "seizure" which incapacitates him until he can be reset. As you can imagine, this happens and some very inopportune times. The character development is awesome and the dialogue can make you think without feeling the need to run to the nearest dictionary or encyclopedia.