That's a smart design. Or more precisely, it's like sailing through currents. You redirect them. They're not going to get a shit lot from EMR though, it will be for very minute trajectory correction in space. Otherwise the amount of EMR needed to shove a ship above LEO would be ludicrous. Brace for nuclear splozionz!
The application to science fiction is quite simple.
Take Stargate. For some of the ships, the question remained how they managed to move around without the help of typical thrusters? Some advanced civilizations seemed to make use of hybrid systems, like the Asgards who used a rather SF staple of both invisible thrusters for course correction and big ass thrusters at the back for the main work.
However for the Goa'uld, it turned out that the vast majority of their ships used no such newtonian thrusters.
One thing we know to exist in Stargate, and to be full of radiations, is subspace.
Applying the theoretical model of the Cannae drive to said subspace, if concentrations of particles were high enough, and if the current were equally strong, using a concentrator-ruder in that flux would allow a ship to sail through subspace.
But now, a ship is not in subspace. So the idea would be that a ship uses a kind of subspace anchor which acts as a deflector/ruder of currents and particles: the anchor is the link between realspace and subspace. It would be like opening a small hyperspace window, but not completely achieving the transition.
There was an episode in SG-1 season 7 called Grace, and Carter achieved moving the Prometheus out of a problematic space phenomenon by phasing the entire ship by exploiting a property of the hyperdrive. A subspace field was cast but the ship wasn't pushed into hyperspace. This allowed the ion thrusters to operate anew (the space anomaly formerly prevented the rockets from working), so the Prometheus and an alien ship doing the same were capable of getting out of this dire situation.
That system would definitely be different from antigravity (unless, I don't know, someone could shoot gravitons back at a planet by making them pass through a U turn device?).