But they also stretch out an elementary particle to gargantuan proportions in order to write out a circuit board on the surface, so I don't know if its really a bastion of hard science fiction. It's closer to fantasy about sciencey stuff.
Only if they are willing to believe that entanglement enables superluminal communication and that protons can be "unfolded" to macroscopic branes.
I've dipped back into reading SF after a long time of only reading the classics (Heinlein et al), and the Three-Body Problem, which I read a few days ago, did seem to me to fit into that mould.
But what are some other modern "hard SF" books you've enjoyed?
All great, but I'm more old-school, William Gibson, James P. Hogan, Greg Bear (Eon series), Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow).
Greg Egan, for instance, has several stories that can only be described as quite hard, but are based around entirely different physics, not merely tweaks to ours, or are based around particular models of black holes that can't be proved, etc.