Identify this scifi book...

[wossname]

I often remember reading a science fiction book about 20 years ago and enjoying it's theme a great deal but I cannot remember the title, or the author or (frustratingly) any actual details that might enable me to identify this tome so that I may purchase a new copy.

My sketchy recollections of the plot are as follows...

Human astronomers scanning for some kind of radiation in a nearby region of space discover some sort of alien relic crash-landed on a moon of some other star. They send a large fleet to investigate and find that the artifact is a massive archive of the collective knowledge of an alien race from many millions of years ago. The story goes into the details of the investigation and has a lot of specific detail about the aliens themselves, the state of their technology when the ship crashed and how the human society would cope with the repercussions of this discovery. The book didn't seem to be dominated by politics or war, more by a sense of exploration into the unknown.

I remember it was a very long book (>1000 pages easily) and I must have raced through it in a week (when I should have been studying for my exams!). I was completely hooked by it and then consequently either lost or gave the book to a friend, never to see it again.

Does anyone recognise this story? Please let me know of some titles or authors.

This book reminds me of the "Halo" video game, the movies "The Time Machine", "Contact" and "Mission to Mars", the book "A for Andromeda", and somewhat of "2001: A Space Odyssey". But it is not related to any of those as far as I can recall.

This is driving me nuts! I think of this book often and crave a chance to re-read it.

[Xorth Tanovar]

Hmmm. Plot sounds familiar, but then again it's probably been visited by many authors over the years.

Not what you're looking for, but in a similar vein is "The Second Earth" by Patrick Woodroffe...he's primarily an artist (and the illustrations in the book are definitely interesting), and the story is a re-telling of an older musical piece by David Greenslade (was then titled "The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony"). Worth a look if you can find a copy, been out of print for some time now.

EDIT: found it here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Earth-Pentateuch-Re-Told/dp/1850280436