| > the drones are left with a bit more autonomy than the Star Trek equivalents I'm not sure I would describe it as more autonomy. The central ship computer was absolutly dominant within the hive mind, and had control over the ancillaries at all time. It's more like personalities of the ancillaries feed back into the hive mind at a somewhat subconscious level, and had quite a bit of impact on the overall personality. > If you're interested in a big space opera about an empire falling apart I found the Collapsing Empire series by John Scalzi to be much more engaging. Yeah, the Imperial Radch series is not about the empire falling apart. That's just something happening in the background, which sometimes drives the plot forwards. Its primary goal is to explore the question of "what does it mean to be human" I really enjoyed John Scalzi's Collapsing Empire series, which is directly about the fall of a civilisation, and how to save the people. The interesting thing is that Collapsing Empire bucks the usual trend of empires falling apart because they grew too big, internal political instability or external rivals. It was stable and only falls apart because the form of FTL they were using to connect their star systems fell apart, and none of the star systems were self sufficient. Also in the genre of "space operas with collapsing empires", I do recommend Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. |