(Found) Book mention within a book identification

Danny McG

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I'm currently reading The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross and it mentions some other book, anyone know?

"As I climb the steps and present my ID to the policemen on duty, all I can think of is a silly book that Bob told me he was reading a couple of years ago, by some dead famous author, who came up with a clever neologism, what was it… an out of concept problem? No: an out of context problem.
Something which organizations or cultures encounter in very much the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop."
 
To quote the novel's Wikipedia page:

The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:​
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. 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.​
 
To quote the novel's Wikipedia page:

The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:​
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. 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.​

My gosh, that style of writing is incredibly similar to Adams'.
 
to his term "out of context "
As it happens, I'm just about to start reading his novel, Halting State (published in 2007, so eight years before The Annihilation Score).

Before I even got to the title page, there's a short section of text where Stross uses "out-of-context", whose meaning is not the same as "outside context" (see my quote in post#5 for an explanation of Banks's term). As Wiktionary puts it, out of context means: "Without context that may be needed for understanding the original meaning."


I think I've heard the term, out of context, used mostly in the... er... context of Person A complaining that Person B has quoted them but omitted the text associated with it (text that provides the context), such that while the words Person B has quoted are what was said/written, the meaning of those words has been changed (to the disadvantage of Person A) by not including that omitted text.
 

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