What's a good science fiction book that has some interesting cutting-edge science to it?

I recently enjoyed Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Heaven , which is based on the new biology of memeplexes, meta-organisms, collective and distributed intelligences arising from radically alien biologies. The main character, Second-best Sailor, is a polypoid; which is to say, an ambulatory squid-like male of a species of coral.

The females live in great telepathic sentient reefs and communicate with the males through chemical signals. These “reefwives” are able to pool their intelligence planet-wide and create predictive scenarios which the males are able sell to other species. The reef wives have recently become aware of a “memeplex” called The Church of Cosmic Unity, which is sweeping through the galaxy’s sentient races like a virus. Cosmic Unity seems high-minded and altruistic enough, but the reefwives have seen this sort of thing before…

What I like about this story, apart from the mind-blowing characters, is that it really teases out a lot of the implications of the new biology of machines, social systems, economies, and emerging forms of consciousness. I am looking for something off the beaten path of starships, phasers, teleporters and time travel. Perhaps, something like Charlie Jade, which was a sci-fi channel series about a detective trying to unravel a story spread across three parallel universes. Perhaps something even mathematical.