I finally got around to reading Blindsight by Peter Watts last month (free online). I stopped reading (long) science fiction a while ago because everything I picked up wound up being a space opera. (The last one I really loved was Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, which is relatively focused, so I started reading the main Revelation Space books -- and they were good, but I seem to have lost the taste for that sort of thing.) Anyway, Blindsight is the kind of thing that I read science fiction for. There's a reason it gets referenced and recommended so much around here.