Markup View

Author: FrodoGoofballCoTV

Dec 10th 2011 at 4:07:50 PM

[[AC: {{Literature}}]]
* IsaacAsimov's Foundation setting tells the tale of multiple empires:
** Earth itself is still in the expansion phase when the first fully sentient robot is developed.  By the time of the Robot novels with the character Detective Bailey, it is already in decline.  In the Empire novels we see Earth has become an unimportant backwater.  By the Foundation era, it has been abandoned and forgotten.
** The spacers are at their height, on the cusp of stabilization and decline, in the novels featuring Detective Bailey.  In the empire novels, they are already gone, except for [[spoiler: robots that have infiltrated human society, and Solaria, the most extreme of the spacer worlds, where the robot:human populaton ratio is over 1000:1.]]
** The empire ruled from the planet Trantor is going through late expansion and early stabilization in the Empire novels.  By the time Hari Seldon, the man ultimately responsible for the Foundation, is born, it is entering decline; by the end of the Foundation novels Trantor is a galactic backwater.
** The Foundation itself is in expansion through most of the Foundation novels; however, the final book reveals that the Foundation will [[spoiler: not succeed in restoring the galaxy to stabilization; humanity's future lies in a different direction.]]

[[AC: {{film}}]]
* In ''StarWars'', the Galactic Republic is in decline at the start of the Episode I, but Emperor Palpatine, rather than squandering it, restores it to expansion, but at the cost of turning it into, well, TheEmpire.  By Episode IV, it is at the end of the stabilization phase.  As Leia had predicted, the decline of his empire is rapid: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  However, in the ExpandedUniverse, the First Galactic Empire persists, in shattered form, for many years after the Emperor's death.  Meanwhile the New Republic has a rather rough road through its expansion phase.