5 ms·

This reminds me of Iain Bank’s Excession. Great book, strongly recommend it.

• cpeterso 7y ago
  The relevant bit from Excession is the discovery of a mysterious entity that is 50x older than the universe.
  • ShamelessC 7y ago
    What's the explanation?
    • cgrealy 7y ago
      Without giving too much away, it's not from this universe. You really should read it, it's one of the best books in the culture series and Banks was a phenomenal writer. It also contains the Affront, a species that are almost comically awful and coined the term "outside context problem": "The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."
      • jackgavigan 7y ago
        You left out the best bit! "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just one, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." Shades of Douglas Adams there...