Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night

In a future where a technology called EmpaVid can manipulate human emotions and perceptions, Rufus Sollenar has staked everything on its success. A ruthless businessman locked in mortal combat with his rival Cortwright Burr, Sollenar will destroy anyone who stands between him and dominance over the market for engineered experience. But when he enlists the enigmatic Mr. Ermine as his advisor, he enters a game far more dangerous than corporate warfare. Ermine seems to know things he shouldn't, to see through walls of crystal into the eye of night itself. As Sollenar's ambitions unravel against the Martian engineers who secretly power Burr's operation, he discovers that the line between manipulator and manipulated has long since dissolved. Budrys writes with cold precision about a man who reaches for immortality and finds something else entirely: a meditation on identity, mortality, and the mirrors we build that eventually reflect only ourselves back. The tragic irony lands because Sollenar never understood what he was truly selling. For readers who want their science fiction dense, dark, and psychologically uncompromising. Fans of early PKD, Alfred Bester at their most savage, or corporate thrillers where the real war is inside the protagonist's skull.