The Urantia Book's distinguishing feature is not its cosmology but its bureaucracy. It describes a universe of local universes and superuniverses with named administrators, chains of authority, categories of angel, developmental stages for inhabited worlds and a system of ascent with defined stages. Readers who come from a religious background often find the sheer organisational detail the strangest thing about it; readers who came in through science fiction find it the reason they stayed. The book's own account of itself is that this material was composed by beings holding those offices, at the request of a supervising authority, for the instruction of a backward planet.