I have...
Enjoyed the hell out of the Revelation Space series, too. He managed to make a non-FTL interstellar human culture (actually, a collection of cultural movements) feel plausible. He also makes good use of a billion years to support the premise: Over time, sentient life is relatively common, but rare at any one moment because they've killed each other off, and/or left automatic weapons systems behind to detect and kill any new life that makes itself known by developing interstellar flight.
I.e., in that series of novels, xenophobic war appears to be.... universal.