Charles Sheffield’s McAndrew short stories are pretty hard sci-fi. Each of them was inspired by a new scientific development or theory at the time that caught the author’s interest. Black holes, high-gee travel, super-dense matter, rogue planets, it’s all in there.
I haven’t read any of his other work yet, but the McAndrew stuff is great.
Yeah, McAndrew is a lot of fun. Sheffield’s other stuff isn’t quite so hard, but he wrote a very well-done non-fiction book called “Borderlands of Science” http://www.amazon.com/Borderlands-Science-Where-Sense-Nonsense/dp/0195143264
Very much not. IIRC the resurrection machinery works by capturing the energy released by an author waving his hands back and forth very quickly.