I just finished rereading Peter Watts’ Blindsight and Echopraxia. They’re both terrific, and I recommend them unreservedly to anyone who’s into wildly imaginative hard sci fi. The only downside is that now I’ll need to spend the next couple of months reading just the most interesting 10% of his citations…

Other good recent reads that I remember right offhand:

John Kessel, The Moon and the Other — interesting look at gender through the lens of a future matriarchy.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin — good overview of the extant theories for how life on Earth got started. I also read parts of Life’s Ratchet, on the same topic, but I didn’t think it was nearly as good.

Ellen Ullman, Life in Code, which had some really good bits, but overall was a bit weak, I thought. Or at least I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as her novel The Bug.

And some rereads… Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Greg Egan’s Diaspora, The Graveyard Book, a bunch of nonfiction…