Turning the genre knob while looking at the audience

I want to be a bit indulgent with my book but in a tasteful way. And by tasteful I mean I want to use genre tropes for a reason and in support of specific goals rather than dumping them into a big vat of tropes. Though there are some tropes I just like and will find justifications for. Having said that...in my book’s backstory a couple thousand years ago there was an empire, it does the whole “rise and fall” thing, has all the best “this is why empires are doomed to fail” hits.

But also at the beginning of their decline they summon a hero from our world to fight a perceived enemy and the hero is like “oh y’all are the bad guys” and turns on them and leads a popular revolution and the empire falls even faster. At present time not much is known about this, and no heroes have been summoned since. But I just like isekai stories and deep history and I intend to fill out the history of the world quite a bit. Some of it will just inform the present day, some of it will be directly mentioned or discovered while exploring.

After the empire the world eventually transitions to representative democracy and that fails too. They stagnate, people become disenfranchised, you know how it is we’re living in it right now!

There is going to be hella justification for the various forms of flat and/or cooperative government structures seen in the book series at present day.

Speaking of, one of the government structures I’ll be exploring is Communalism, thought up by Murray Bookchin. Communalism works on a local level, in smaller directly democratic assemblies that confederate with each other to form larger cooperative structures. This leads to people having more direct input and power over themselves, rather than leaving it up to representatives and having the average person ignoring political organization.

I have really taken to heart what Ursula Le Guin has said about using sci-fi and fantasy to show people alternative ways to live beyond what we have right now. Those are the kinds of books I want to write.