It seems to me that when Egan attempts to make his books more 'literary' by making concepts secondary to the 'human interest' elements of characterization and emotional struggle, his writing becomes stilted and awkward. When he lets characters and their personal perspectives be straw dogs that illustrate and instantiate transcendent concepts, the work is excellent and the story flows.

The best science fiction has always been so deeply concerned with ideas that they are treated as more vital than the story's human elements, and it has been criticized on those grounds as not being true literature. I say literature is a pointless appeal to hardwired primate thought patterns that are of little value or interest.