While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's writing, his text would definitively be better and more interesting if the characters were not so artific

While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's writing, his text would definitively be better and more interesting if the characters were not so artificial, without losing anything about the science. It is amusing to think that a lot of people who are defending Egan on this point would probably be uncompromising on their very low opinion on a book containing badly put together science. They will probably not say "it's not for me, but why not, the author was interested in the characters, the science is just an excuse", but rather "no, they use science, so they need to do the science correctly". But they will ignore this argument ("they use characters, so they need to do characters correctly") is the case of Egan.