Watching a brief fan-made animation of parts of the story from Gideon/Harrow/Non the Ninth yesterday. I very much want to go back and re-read them all now to see if this holds up.
The necromancy in the story iirc, was a side effect from a project that was working to save as many people as possible from some impending doom. The project was shut down, again iirc, in favor of some other smaller, more expensive program which would save a much smaller number of extremely rich people only.
In the present time that the story is set in, there are two civilizations I think - one necromantic, the other not. The second one, I am presuming, was the result of the second program. I don't think the books have quite got to their origin.
Still, there's a larger theme here. The rich abandon the poor, the poor do what they have to do to survive and the rich get pissy about it. There's a related theme in N.K. Jemisin's The World We Make (excellent book) where the older multidimensional beings are expecting the young to be grateful that they are being offered a quick death.
There's a theory in literature called the death of the author where, as I understand it, the meaning of a text is entirely removed from any meaning the author might have intended, and is only found by the reader. Personally, I'm on the side of the argument that thinks this theory is complete bullshit. The communication of meaning isn't necessarily a direct process, but the author sure as hell gets to contribute to any meaning found by the reader.
That said, I'm also fully capable of holding the idea that a work can have many meanings, not all of them intended by the author. I wonder sometimes about the larger themes I see in some fiction, whether it was intentional or not on the part of the author to put it there. Especially with the ones that take me a while to see and then I get looked at dubiously when I try and talk about them,
The prime example of this is I think, The Orville. Some of the best Star Trek every written. Over the three seasons (so far, hopefully more to come), I see a larger theme relating to social change. It starts out with the Union (nominal humanity stand-in) in an alliance with the strong but bigoted Moclans, trying to form an further alliance with the religious zealots, the Krill, to stand against the AI Kaylon.
Over the course of the series it goes from (Union + bigots + religious zealots) vs technology. Eventually the bigots and union part ways and you end up with union + technology vs bigots + religious zealots. i.e. to retain it's core, the union has do distance itself from bigotry and zealotry and maintain a wary alliance with technology. Not saying that that's is where our world is headed - it's not, but it's definitely a theme in the work worth thinking about I think.