Favorite novel, I think: Orthogonal by Greg Egan. First couple books in a trilogy are out. If you liked Egan in the 90s but mostly lost interest this millennium, like me, then take a look.
On a similar note, my own choice is Egan's Diaspora. Most of the characters are sentient software, and it explores some of the implications of being able to fork oneself, or rewrite your software. On top of that the physics is, to the best of my mildly-educated knowledge, an extension of General Relativity consistent with what we already know; and part of it takes place in a six-dimensional spacetime.
The only other Egan I've read is his collection Luminosity, which was similarly impressive. I'm definitely going to check him out further.
Yes to more technical, no to people, alas. Despite which, the conflicts and resolutions were pretty good. But the science fiction is brilliant.
(Incandescence also had some neat ideas, and I don't regret reading it -- it showed a reasonable way much of general relativity could be discovered before newtonian physics; but the people stuff irritated me. There was eventually an in-story explanation for the implausible characters, but it wasn't enough.)
