| The word “empire” is a popular magnet for prospective readers or game-players, however unpopular it might be in real political life.
Probably the most familiar example in SF is the Galactic Empire whose last two centuries of decline and fall is portrayed in Asimov’s Foundation series. In his monochrome way, eschewing purple prose, Asimov evokes the wonder and marvel of a realm stretching across a hundred thousand light-years and ruling quintillions of people.
Another noteworthy example is the Terran Empire of Poul Anderson’s Flandry series, which, though nowhere near Galaxy-wide, does stretch over a respectable 200 light-years and four million worlds. Moreover there is a lot more colour here than in Asimov’s work. Anderson depicts cultural variety among humans and aliens – the latter completely lacking in the Foundation series, and rightly so (the point of that series being the scientific manipulation of human history, aliens would have provided a distraction that messed up the scheme).
The long arm of Empire can stretch not only across space but across Time. In Barrington Bayley’s The Fall of Chronopolis the fanatical rulers of the Chronotic Empire try to extend their sway over the future. Their Time Fleet is at war with that of a rival regime, the Hegemony, which will exist in centuries to come. Each armada tries to alter history so as to undermine the existential foundation of the other. Spookily – a typical Bayley touch – when such alteration is carried out, the undermined fleet does not disappear straightaway, but lingers a few hours before fading; a few hours during which the commanders must frantically try to reverse the disaster.
Rather than across Time, the Imperium in Keith Laumer’s series (Worlds of the Imperium, The Other Side of Time, Assignment in Nowhere) extends across probability worlds. Laumer’s work, unlike the others I have considered so far, is a first-person narrative. Despite his tremendous theme, the atmosphere of his scenes seems more related to our real world. His Imperium, interestingly, is an Anglo-German polity, diverging from our history around 1760 – a world in which the American colonies remained part of the British Empire and that empire later united with Germany. When the discovery was made that one could cross the “Net” of probability worlds, the Imperium found that most worlds had been destroyed by side-effects of that same discovery, creating a Blight that stretched wide across the Net. Only a few Earths – the Imperium’s, ours, and a third one – survived. And the third one was out to dominate the others…
This small sample of science-fictional empire-building makes it obvious why the theme is so popular. It is tailor made for that unity-in-multiplicity allied with dramatic splendour, which creators of fictional worlds love to evoke and readers love to explore.
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