- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The problem here is the dubious plausibility of this happening when a typical "splinter polity" has a population in the hundreds of millions or billions.
Especially when even on those splinter polities, we see clear evidence enough technological infrastructure (i.e. "oil and coal" powered machinery in places like Anacreon, reinforced concrete fortifications on Korrell). Such things strongly, strongly imply that in the splinter polities, someone is still running universities and training engineers and other technical specialists of some kind.
The only thing that makes such a notion remotely plausible would be, in effect, deliberate sabotage of the technological base. For instance, the "Empire deliberately overcentralized high-tech manufacturing and design on highly vulnerable worlds to make political control easier, and this critical infrastructure was then devastated by repeated rounds of civil war."
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A big part of the problem is that the entire concept of a total "fall of galactic civilization" is predicated on objectively false historiography! At the time of writing, Isaac Asimov was a heavily self-taught man in his early twenties whose college educational background had little to do with the humanities. He was basing his concept of the fall of the Roman Empire largely on Edward Gibbon, who wrote in the 1700s.
Gibbon, in turn, quite simply had no relevant knowledge of the true material conditions that obtained during and shortly after the 'Fall of Rome.' He had no strong grounding in scientific archaeology, which provides modern historians with evidence. He had a somewhat incomplete corpus of classical Latin sources to rely on. He did not even have the analytical toolkit modern historians use to discuss the question!
By modern standards, there is little good that can be said about Gibbon's analysis.
So of course when a fiction author tries to create a fictional world in which the "fall of the Galactic Empire" results in an outcome like what Gibbon largely incorrectly believed had been associated with the fall of Rome... You get an unrealistic historical process that does not reflect things that would realistically happen.
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In much the same way, science fiction based around concepts like "Space Age stasis" often draw very, very heavily on obsolete concepts from mid-20th century or earlier historiography. Stuff that by modern standards is no better than pop history, often worse because it's often based on deeply flawed, racist, or simply underinformed notions about how various historical times and places functioned. Ideas like "oriental despotism," "decadence," "hydraulic despotism," and Spengler-esque cycles of history quite simply do not align with reality in the way that many fiction authors thought, and in some cases still think, that they do.
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