Good Guys, Bad Guys

In Frank Herbert's Dune, the honourable Atreides and the depraved Harkonnen are classic good guys and bad guys although real life and some other works of fiction are more complicated and ambiguous. Most of us have our particular "bad guys" among contemporary politicians but they are different bad guys depending on which side we are on and there are not just two clear cut sides either but, before this line of thought goes any further, no one need here and now state which side he is on. 

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, is the Terran Empire good or bad? We have been through this before. The Empire, even if "good" overall, must endure first the depraved Emperor Josip, then civil war, then the usurper, Emperor Hans. "Good guys" like Flandry work to restore order even when legitimacy has been lost. Aycharaych turns out to have had basically "good" motivations for his undeniably evil machinations. These complexities, albeit fictional, bear the stamp of real life. A repentant Aycharaych would have made for an interesting sequel. The Technic History could have been extended indefinitely without becoming repetitive whereas franchise sf mass produces new volumes with a single familiar word or phrase in their titles. At the cinema, we saw not only Dune, Part 2, but also the trailer for a new Planet Of The Apes film which, of course, evidently had better special effects than before.