rules a 400 light-year diameter sphere of space;
has regular contact with only a minority of planetary systems in that sphere - most have been visited just once or never;
is able to communicate instantaneously across only one light-year by modulating hyperdrive pulses.
Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire:
rules nearly twenty-five million humanly inhabited planets throughout the Galaxy;
broadcasts three-dimensional hypervideo newscasts of Coronations or Galactic Council openings.
The former sounds like a less implausible version of the latter.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson's Technic stories and Terran Empire were much more satisfactory and plausible than Asimov's Galactic Empire. Altho, to be fair, we get a glimpse of how the early Galactic Empire was administered in "Blind Alley."
The Terran Empire had one hundred thousand worlds, human and non-human, with formalized, official relations with each other and the Imperium. It was also mentioned that one or two multiples of that number had some kind of shadowy contact with the Empire. That probably included many of the stars in the Imperial sphere which had been visited only once or twice.
Ad astra! Sean
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