skygiants

YES. That aspect was deeply weird and satisfying at once to me in college. My formerly local library had lost its copy of Wounded Sky and it was OOP at the time, so I read it only after My Enemy, My Ally, The Romulan Way, Spock's World, the three Door books, and the first four Wizards books, largely because college meant a different local public library--and the skies opened and I understood too much, briefly.

Actually, it was a great antidote to all of the writers I'd read who seemed to have much creepier overarching worldbuilding tendencies. Timeheart: awesomer than going back in time to sleep with one's mother (Heinlein), for example.