Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

The galaxy image had occurred to her then, and she thought at the time about the similarity of the forces which shaped both the little and the vast. She had thought, And which is really the most important? but then felt embarrassed to have thought such a thing.

This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we? Look in from outside; ask yourself… Just what are we doing?

Who are we? Who we are. Just what we’re taken as being. What we know and what we do. No less or more. Information being passed on. Patterns, galaxies, stellar systems, planets, all evolve; matter in the raw changes, progresses in a way. Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence—consciousness—an order quicker, another new plane. Beyond was unknown, too vague to be understood (ask a Dra’Azon, perhaps, and wait for the answer)… all just refining, a process of getting it more right (if right itself was right)….

“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances.