The author is also a computer scientist so many of his books are well detailed for those versed in related fields (the way biologists write sci-fi books that scatter biology details other readers not versed in the subject would miss) like people here.

A Deepness in the Sky, for example, touches on open source, technical debt, project management, memory density, branching, DRM, encryption, stenography, and other more nuanced topics; but it's a sci-fi novel first. All in the backdrop of a universe with no FTL (at least for this book in the "series", more like books in the same universe).

He also does great alien races (the other book in the series, A Fire upon the Deep, has alien races which behave on different computational architectures to achieve sentience; and touches on obfuscated code (among other topics) in a great way).

> The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars at below light speed.

House of Suns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Suns) was one of the best examples of that. Starship chases lasting thousands of years, people making 200,000 year circuits of the galaxy...

I was very taken with the portrayal of the Queng Ho in 'A Deepness in the Sky'. I liked the idea that a trading culture would foster technological development across a large swath of space by broadcasting "here's how you bootstrap an advanced civilization" instructions to anyone who got as far as inventing radios. Then they'd wander around at relativistic speeds, trying to time their visits to each system to coincide with periods of high-tech development so they could do some trading (before each civilization inevitably choked on its own complexity. That part was a bummer)