Cringe at the 'science' in SF!

I regard Larry Niven's Legacy of Heorot as good science in SF.

The protagonists are colonists on a newplanet around another star. They travelled in an ark ship, under induced hibernation, under very low body temperature, at sub light speeds, and arrived. The story begins after their arrival, when they are landed and trying to set up a self sufficient colony. The story line involves conflict with a native semi-intelligent life form, which is designed by the author with innovative metabolism.

The point being that you do not need fantasy elements to write SF that sticks to good science.

Larry Niven does not always write such straight science. In fact, he wrote a series of short time travel stories called Flight of the Horse, in which he realised that time travel was magic, and so treated the whole series of stories as a fantasy, not SF, series. Fun!