You Need To Read More Science Fiction.

I Deliberately Keep Myself Apart From A Lot Of Stuff; I Don't Tweet, I Don't Do Facebook, I Don't Blog, And That's Largely Because I Spend My Working Life Staring At A Screen And Hitting A Keyboard, I Am Trying To Cut Down On That, Not Increase It.

It Looks Perverted And Wasteful To Us, But Then One Thing That Empires Are Not About Is The Efficient Use Of Resources And The Spread Of Happiness; Both Are Typically Accomplished Despite The Economic Short-circuiting - Corruption And Favoritism, Mostly- Endemic To The System.

Science Fiction Has Its Own History, Its Own Legacy Of What's Been Done, What's Been Superseded, What's So Much Part Of The Furniture It's Practically Part Of The Fabric Now, What's Become No More Than A Joke... And So On. It's Just Plain Foolish, As Well As Comically Arrogant, To Ignore All This, To Fail To Do The Most Basic Research.

Empires Are Synonymous With Centralized If Occasionally Schismatized Hierarchical Power Structures In Which Influence Is Restricted To An Economically Privileged Class Retaining Its Advantages Through Usually A Judicious Use Of Oppression And Skilled Manipulation Of Both The Society's Information Dissemination Systems And Its Lesser As A Rule Nominally Independent Power Systems. In Short, It's All About Dominance.

I Don't Really Do Themes. I Might Accidentally, But Themes Are An Emergent Phenomena Of The Writing Of The Book, Of Just Trying To Get A Story Out There.