Trope-a-Day: Terminally Dependent Society
Terminally Dependent Society: Consciously averted, because even the people who run big, centralizable systems in the Empire are Genre Savvy about this one, and engage in distribution, variation, and redundancy whenever they can, in things as disparate as power grids, air recyclers, parcel delivery, and executive authority. There’re still a few terminal dependencies – if nothing else, you can never1 escape a terminal dependency on the universe’s available supply of negentropy – but they work hard to avoid them whenever possible.
Playing hydraulic-empire games may be good enough for the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms, but bigger picture, people.
1. But we’re working on it anyway.