One thing that always impressed me about Robert L. Forward was how he'd stop the story just long enough to explain the science. Most authors would simply say, "Here's the new drive." Forward wanted you to understand how it might actually work.
The toroidal magnetic launcher in Timemaster is a perfect example. I still remember staring at the diagrams trying to wrap my head around the idea of spinning incredibly dense matter around a torus at relativistic speeds to create enough frame dragging to launch a spacecraft. Whether it's actually possible is another matter, but Forward made it feel like you were reading tomorrow's engineering instead of science fiction.
I don't know many authors who could pull that off. That's one of the reasons his books have stayed with me for so many years.
Darth Yoda
"Debugging the galaxy, one bite at a time."