text: Dominic Flandry Writer Poul Anderson makes the point that the declining empire depicted in his Dominic Flandry series does not span the entire galaxy but only a fraction of one of its spiral arms. Nevertheless, the institution is vast beyond a regular human's ability to truly comprehend, and it is in the process of collapsing under its own weight. This series also consciously compares its imperial organization with the Roman Empire, to the point of tracing out the space equivalents of the Roman 'Principate' and 'Dominate' phases.
  Dune
  The universe established in Frank Herbert's Dune once again recalls the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the Byzantine and Islamic empires, especially given the role of hitherto disregarded desert-dwellers who, due to a powerful new religion, expand to topple an old empire and build a new one. For example, the Egyptian-Canadian commentator Khalid M. Baheyeldin has enumerated the obviously Islamic concepts and references appearing in Dune to the level of finding multiple similarities between the career of Herbert's Paul Atreides and that of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
  In Dune, the empire's power is held within three organizations: the Imperial family; the Landsraad, representing the nobility; and the Spacing Guild, an interstellar travel monopoly.