Oh my gosh, yes, yes, yes. The difference between being like "ha ha! I read Dragonsdawn something like eight hundred times as a child!* I know ALL ABOUT terraforming with intermediary forms!" as on page one, and the passage of the tornado is just... Holy everliving fuck. Also the scale difference between "oh there's a satellite and it crashed, awesome" and the house-sized, incomprehensible monster embedded in Dust Ridge, which might as well be the goddamn Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes for all the good it does Rowan... and the realization that terraforming can maybe proceed for a couple more cycles while the Eastern Guidestar is still up but then it's going to stop and the planet is going to win and all of these people and their lives are going to end because of one asshole (or! powerhungry AI or colonial government terminating the failed experiment a la Running Out of Time, which I think is a strong possibility based on the way Corwin talked about getting apprentices from "his own people" and the way that Fletcher talked about getting into "logistics" omggggggggggggg)

*I'm actually fairly sure, tangentially, that I read a book with this exact world-setup--razorsharp grass in multiple colors or varieties, and there's the normal kind and then the creepy alien kind and the intermediary, terraforming kind. But I can't tell if this is a real memory, or a conflation of Grass by Sheri S. Tepper and Lusitania from the Ender books.