I think you may have picked up on something there, talking about a "static society". I remember reading a comment from Hamilton at one point (possibly in the fo

I think you may have picked up on something there, talking about a "static society". I remember reading a comment from Hamilton at one point (possibly in the fore/afterword?) that the goal of the Night's Dawn trilogy was to write about a society so stable and stagnant that change has to be forced upon it from without. And while the Commonwealth saga may not have shared the same explicit premise, there were definite parallels.