| An Outside Context Problem is a concept from the science fiction author Iain M. Banks. It describes esentially any problem that a civilization usually only faces once. His book Excession deals with The Culture coming head-to-head with an OCP.
He describes an OCP as this (loosely): Imagine you are in a group of people happily living off the land, inventing the wheel, harnessing water, when all of a sudden a group of massive steel ships appear with no sails and steam coming off the tops. They have large sticks that make a lot of noise, they're big into gifts to their emperor called "taxes" and their glowing-eyed religous men would like a word with your priests... | 
