Literary dictators live for ever - not

I finished reading a new SF space opera yesterday.  I'm not normally a fan of space operas, and this one left me completely cold.

It got me wondering why writers think that an all-powerful dictator should be able to hold onto his or her power and vast empire for centuries.  Especially when those characters are human, which I think these were (but I'm not entirely sure).  From which you probably realise that the book left me feeling puzzled and scratching my head.

I have real difficulty in believing that any human dictator could hold onto the power of empire for centuries.  It just isn't in our nature.  There'll never come a day when every human being sees the world the same way and believes the same things.  The only way you could force humans to all believe the  same thing is with the threat of force.  And that means use of technology.

And the other problem I have with these sprawling space operas is that the technology never seems to break down at key moments.  The all-seeing eyes always work, and the AIs faithfully serve the masters who made them, despite sometimes having far superior intelligence and wisdom to those masters.  Over the vast distance of interstellar space, that's highly unlikely.

I can't see such a dictator lasting for centuries.  Even on earth, brutal regimes may be able to hang onto power through the use of force for fifty or sixty years, but at some point things change.  The oppressed decide they've had enough and overcome their fear and rebel.

Human society is messy, with so many different cultures and beliefs, not all of which are good.  But that's who we are, an arguing, debating, disagreeing mass of people.  I think we'll still be like that in two centuries' time, if we're still here by then.  And I like my fiction to reflect that messy nature, with rebels and people who dare to disagree with dictators.  People who carry the seeds of idealist freedom against oppression.