Science Fiction is famous for the bewildering variety of worlds it imagines. This is particularly true for its political systems. A newcomer to SF might well be astounded by the diverse range of governmental arrangements on display. Let me provide some examples…
In Arkady Martine’s impressive debut, A Memory Called Empire, reluctant ambassador Mahit Dzmare is dispatched by her native Lisl Station to replace the previous ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire, the dominant local power. Her task is complicated by her predecessor Aghavn’s inexplicable disinclination to maintain certain vital records, a lack of communication so profound that Lisl Station is unclear why, exactly, Aghavn needs to be replaced.
The Empire is filled with factions, but the central political fact is this: all political legitimacy derives from the Light-Emitting Starlike Emperor. Every machination has to frame itself as an act of loyalty to the person or at least the office of the Emperor. This is true when the Light-Emitting Starlike Emperor is a person of remarkable insight and wisdom and also when they are a person of somewhat less remarkable insight and wisdom. The important thing is, someone is in charge, limited only by their skill at getting the bureaucracies pointed in the same direction.
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A Memory Called Empire
In stark contrast to Martine’s Emperor, JY Yang’s addictive silkpunk Tensorate series offers a Protector. Hekate, the woman who eventually becomes her land’s Protector, is a big believer in centralized power and the right of all people to do what they are told or suffer the consequences. Thanks to her efforts to reform the Protectorate’s government, pretty much all of the events of the four volumes to date (The Black Tides of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, The Ascent to Godhood) are set in motion either by her direct whim or in opposition to her decrees. It’s a lean, efficient approach to governance, although it does raise the question of how things will work after Hekate dies.
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The Black Tides of Heaven
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth turns instead to a system that has solved the issue of succession through the quite reasonable method of using dark necromancy to ensure the Emperor never dies. Or at least remains…mobile. It’s a world blessedly free of distractions like civil liberties or worrying whether the next ruler will be up to the job. After all, as long as everything goes to plan, there’s never going to be a next emperor.1
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Gideon the Ninth
In Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series, the Radch empire eschewed dark magic, instead guaranteeing continuity of government in the person of Lord of the Radch Anaander Mianaai. Although focused on other characters, the trilogy does hint at the demands such a system places on an undying autocrat. Despite centuries of experience, Anaander often finds themselves of two minds about how to resolve issues confronting the Empire. Being the anointed ruler of a star-spanning empire doesn’t spare one from being besides oneself with stress.
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Ancillary Justice
In Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever, visionary businesswoman Vivian Liao is on the verge of streamlining Earth’s bewildering assortment of competing power structures when she is snatched away to a future that could almost be the world of her dreams, save for one minor detail. The Milky Way that Liao finds herself in is dominated by the titular Empress: other powers prevail only to the degree they manage not to catch the Empress’s attention. It’s an efficiently centralized system with one major flaw: Liao isn’t in charge. Wait…two major flaws: the Empress is aware of Liao for some reason, and that never works out well for the targets of the great one’s attention.
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Empress of Forever
K.B. Wagers’ Indranan War Series offers an entirely different approach: even someone like Hail Bristol, gruff gunrunner, can aspire to the highest office, provided they are willing to work hard and are also the only direct descendant of the current empress to avoid assassination. This is the sort of wild, wide-open, freewheeling political system for which SF is famous. It’s a Horatio Alger-esque tale that should inspire readers whose immediate family happens to include a parent or grandparent whose titles include some variation of “Emperor.”
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Behind the Throne
Empress, Deathless Leader, Protector, Supreme Monarch, That One Dude With All the Power: there are so many ways to arrange and govern the political entities of tomorrow! Feel free to mention your own favourites in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Immortality isn’t necessarily the guarantor of stability one might reasonably expect. Take Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol series—“The Collapsium” (2000), “The Wellstone” (2003), “Lost in Transmission” (2004) “To Crush the Moon” (2005). Technology means everyone can potentially live forever. There’s just one snag: the first generation of immortals has a talent for comprehensively wretched life decisions, from communications technology with apocalyptic failure modes, to the curious decision to provide immortal rulers with an increasingly impatient heir.
Well, there’s the Warhammer 40k Emperor of Man but he’s thoroughly unpleasant and somewhat dead.
Thanks for addressing current sf. Sounds like things haven’t changed much since the golden age.
Where are Too Like the Ligthning, Infomocracy, The Diamond Age or Neptune’s Brood, as futuristic forms of political and economic organisation that do not involve an emperor of sorts.
I know this is about rulers, but there are different ways to rule.
At risk of providing a spoiler, the prologue to Harrow the Ninth (the sequel to Gideon the Ninth) begins, “The night before the Emperor’s murder …”
(Now y’all will have to wait until next June to find out what happens after his Necromantic Majesty cacks it.) [Roll over text to read!]
The only sort of ruler harder to kill for realsies and forever than the necromantic sort are the ones who keep off-site backups of themselves.
I enjoy the governing system established by Neil Asher’s Polity line of books. Still working through the Ian Cormac series of Polity books, but the universe Asher creates is an amazing escape and thought provoking idea.
Too Like the Lightning does, in fact, have an emperor — is not the leader of the Mason faction addressed as such?
@@.-@ You working on anything in vein of Rule 34, H. State? Love all your books
Goldomark in #3:
You pose a worthwhile question, but I prefer to regard your examples as possible fodder for a future Nicollian essay, rather than as omissions from this one.
I love the Imperial Radch trilogy, and Anaander Mianaai is a terrific character(s). The Martine definitely sounds cool, and I’ll take it out for a spin. The Yang sounds promising, but I don’t know if I’m in the mood to commit to a 4 (so far) volume series.
The emperor in Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire/The Killing of Worlds (I’ve read that it was written as one book and split apart by Tor) is fascinating. I wish Westerfeld would write more adult space opera.
I always thought Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide had an interesting approach to this: ‘The hereditary emperor is nearly dead, and has been for many centuries…’
I like a little more anarchy in my SF governments. Snow Crash comes to mind.
If, in a future sequel to A Memory Called Empire, the Light Emitting Starlike Emperor were to die, would that hypothetical future book be a Light Emitting Die Ode?
Charles Stross’ Accelerando features a self declared Queen of the Ring Imperium. She’s basically good people (with a family as screwed up as the typical royal family though).
@Goldmark #3: There’s also L.X. Beckett’s Gamechanger. No emperor and mass democracy for everyone. There’s also the Quantum Thief series – multiple competing powers (sidelined Mars with it’s King/Cryptarch, the terrifying Sobernost group minds, the raucous Zoku gaming clans governed by a gamified government as rigid as the Chinese bureaucratic exams in its own way). Another one full of odd cultures and non-dictatorial governments is John Barnes’ Thousand Cultures, particularly Nou Occitan (figurehead king and queen, technocracy otherwise) and Hedonia (government by lottery and aptitude).
In an example of centralized power, there’s Allen Cole and Chris Bunch’s Sten series with it’s immortal emperor (and an election in The Emperor’s Return). \
@cstross #4: tease.
It would be nice to see some sf, especially space opera, with representative government. Why do so many sff writers seem to hate it?
There are also a bunch of books with AI rulers.A recent one I liked a lot is “The Outside” by Ada Hoffman
I don’t know what the issue is with democracy in SF. Yesterday’s election was thrilling, esp one assumes for the DRO who went home in sole possession of vital information needed to resolve a close race.
You don’t know true terror until you realize that yes, local electors are going to insist on clampering over a wall rather than take the very small detour needed to get to the poll site safely, and yes, the surface onto which they would fall if they slipped was unforgiving.
(we moved SUVs to block access to the wall and they climbed over those too)
@@.-@. cstross: “At risk of providing a spoiler…”
That’s not a risk, that’s just out and out spoiling… :p
This article one of the clearest examples in a while that this is a marketing site.
An obvious earlier model for this figure would be Leto in God Emperor of Dune. And the model for him might just be Hari Seldon from the Foundation series. (I realize Seldon’s personal lifespan is short, but he has an “effective” lifespan of a millennium, thanks to the power of Psychohistory and a series of prerecorded messages.)
@21: “The Emperor’s murder” could be a murder committed by an Emperor, although there or in ancient Rome, that is unlikely to call for the word “the”. Since the setting apparently has death be optional, at least for some people, it also might not lead to a change of government.
@22: Hari Seldon deepfakes? I don’t think that’s canonical, but maybe. On the other hand, in the original “trilogy”, “psychohistory” was valid science – as long as nothing like you-know-what turned up – but also, people knowing what the Great Plan is can get in the way of the Great Plan. For instance if they’re the Great Sacrificable Goat and they know it.
Whoever: the argument against writing about democracy, is that it’s nice to have it, but not so nice to watch it being performed (I live in the United Kingdom incidentally, which despite the name and recent news, is one) – meaning particularly the governing rather than the elections, but… I don’t stay up at night to watch those either. I go to bed and expect the government will be there in the morning. Unless it goes very badly indeed, in which case getting up is either not worth doing, or not an option. At the moment I half expect war with France, and we and they have nuclear missiles.
His title gives it away: The Eternal Emperor in Cole & Bunch’s Sten series. An entertaining, enigmatic character who grows less sympathetic and less enigmatic as the series goes on. Still one of my favorites!
I quite liked the Eternal Emperor. I did NOT like his system of government however. Not one bit.
Since this is a current page referring to “A Memory Called Empire”… does that extraordinary throne on the cover appear in the book, described like that? And should I be thinking outside the oeuvre of G.R.R. Martin for prior examples of major throneage? I suppose Popes in real life have pretty good thrones…. and Abraham Lincoln of course.
Walter John William’s “Drake Maijstral” series has an Emperor who has been frozen, and the first volume, “The Crown Jewels” deals with what happens when various parties discover a reliquary that contains the output of said crown jewels…
This was the endgame Emperor Palpatine was aiming for as spelled out in the pre-Disney Expanded Universe and only hinted at in Revenge of the Sith: Palpatine knew of a way via the Dark Side to transfer his consciousness and memories to another body: he was working to solve the problem of clone instability when he died was killed. Unbeknownst to Vader, Sideous was planning to replace the Rule of Two with the Rule of One, and become a perfect vessel for the Dark Side that would rule the galaxy forever.
Then there was “I Worship His Shadow”, the movie that founded the Lexx series. A (nearly) undying god-emperor rules a totalitarian theocracy seeking the conquest of the entire universe. Ironically it turns out (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)
-that “His Shadow” is only a dehumanized shell for the will of the last of an alien species called the Insects; whose goal is to incorporate all of humanity under one government, the better to then kill them all.
@7: Yes, although it is probably easier to cease living under his rule than the other examples on this list.
@10: If it helps, Tensorate is a novella series so the volumes aren’t particularly thick.
@19: I quite enjoy the vote-counting scenes in Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, although Barrayar does provide another imperial example for the list. (Albeit in a setting where there’s at least one democratic planet.)
You guys are being weirdly coy about the fact that the Emperor of the Raadch maintains power through dozens, if not hundreds, of clones of herself. It’s not some kind of twist. You know that the Emperor uses clones from the first time we meet her.
@17, @19: To be honest, I don’t think it’s necessary that a story must always reflect the personal and political beliefs of either the author or its readership. Yes, good stories can address political issues and be forward-thinking about things, but sometimes, it’s nice to look at things from another angle and explore values and ideas that aren’t necessarily your own or you would ever dream of considering in real life. If nothing else, it ensures that the story remains a story rather than devolving into the first draft of a stump speech.
@28: Regarding Palpatine, I think they did something similar with the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, with the Emperor Valkorion/Vitiate.
@29 I was amused that there’s more actual politics and voting in A Civil Campaign than there’s been in fifty years of Star Trek, despite the latter being set in a liberal democracy.
Emperors, or even interstellar governments, are vanishingly rare in the SF I read. Maybe stop accepting so much Baen shovelware?
Iain M. Banks’ Culture are anarcho-communists, enabled by AI minds which spend a trivial amount of their processing time and energy providing for Humanoid whims. But there is one interstellar empire: The genocidal, religious fanatic Idirians.
Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep has local states which can be anything, Straumli Realm is implied to be a post-monarchial democracy, since the Age of Princesses is over. The Tines’ world is a patchwork of little monarchies and gangs.
Greg Egan’s Diaspora, Schild’s Ladder, and such, are anarchist and extremely consensus-based, consent-required governance. It’s easy to split off to your own private world and run that how you want, but imposing it on anyone else is forbidden, and technically difficult or impossible.
Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi has a caste of planetary dictators with the right to use nanotech, but in most cases they’re very hands-off, and there’s no official hierarchy among them. Ideally. Turns out in practice arming even the smartest, best-intentioned people with godlike powers and tyranny over their subjects is a bad idea, who knew?
“Dinosaurs” also by WJW has a post-political system for post-Humans.
Neal Asher has powerful and territorial AIs, which each rule their own planet or ship, but don’t generally impose much law & order on the Humans. It’s mostly a benevolent anarchy with the threat of orbital strikes, killer drones, or assassins when they get out of hand. In the Gridlinked era, the Polity government of Earth tries to use force to keep politics pointed the way they like, but it doesn’t do much good. The AIs can barely agree to fight the Prador and keep a border for the Polity. By Spatterjay a millennium later, even that much collusion is withering away.
“James S.A. Corey”‘s books have a modern fake partisan democracy/plutocracy on Earth, anarchy/sorta democracy/sorta terrorist junta in the Belt, military dictatorship on Mars, no government at all on the colonies.
James Gunn’s Transcendental series has a Galactic Federation bureaucracy and Council, and they’re just mouthpieces for the computers. It’s a tyranny, but the tyranny of a system grinding everyone down.
Martha Wells’ Murderbot chronicles have interstellar anarchy with some kind of legal contract system; how that’s enforced isn’t clear. There’s local corporate dictatorships, hippie communes, and everything in between. There’s a lot of small-scale armed conflict requiring the services of said murderbots, but not visibly any warships or invasions, so it must be working.
Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger series has a million planetoids each with their own government, democracy included on some of them, and star-sailing ships which are more or less pirate democracies. There’s a mostly-anarchic system in his Revelation Space series; some planets have governments, some have rich people with hit squads, which is much the same thing.
Peter F. Hamilton’s books mostly have complex technocratic governments, seemingly mostly run by unelected factions controlling the bureaucracy. Some colonies are independent. And then aliens/undead/religious cults disrupt that.
Ann Leckie’s bullshit book of religious morons in space was the last thing I read with an Emperor. I repeatedly wished it was in print so I could throw it across the room. Loathsome, uneducated, scientifically-illiterate, badly-written trash. Of course it had an Emperor, because that’s the dumbest idea that could be put to print.
@23/Robert Carnegie: “Whoever: the argument against writing about democracy, is that it’s […] not so nice to watch it being performed”
That may be true, but it’s equally true for dictatorships.
“At the moment I half expect war with France, and we and they have nuclear missiles.”
What? That won’t happen. Don’t worry.
@29/Goobergunch: “I quite enjoy the vote-counting scenes in Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, although Barrayar does provide another imperial example for the list. (Albeit in a setting where there’s at least one democratic planet.)”
I haven’t read A Civil Campaign, only Shards of Honor. In that one I found that the author made the imperial system of Barrayar look unreasonably good by giving the democratic planet an unlikeable and somewhat ridiculous president. Not that unlikeable and ridiculous presidents don’t happen in real life, but in the context of the novel, it felt like advertising feudalism. Is A Civil Campaign different?
@32/Gareth Wilson: “I was amused that there’s more actual politics and voting in A Civil Campaign than there’s been in fifty years of Star Trek, despite the latter being set in a liberal democracy.”
I think that Star Trek was wise in staying away from details about the liberal democracy it was set in. When they did provide details, I was often disappointed, because more often than not, they made the Federation look like the contemporary USA. But that isn’t how an enlightened future society with input from many different Earth societies plus lots and lots of alien planets would look like. It isn’t believable.
@34:
While Beta had a ridiculous president during Shards, at the same time, Barrayar is shown to have a monstrous Imperial heir abetted by equally monstrous nobles (balanced by some very noble nobles). Civil Campaign has a good emperor (no heirs yet), but the society as a whole is evolving towards rule of law (with some hiccups).
These extremely strong opinions on Leckie’s books make me think I should read them. They must be doing something potent to elicit that kind of reaction.
black tides looks good![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@38 Sunspear: Hey, Emperors can do that kind of thing; and as you might have noticed from my post, my opinion of Imperial morality isn’t great. Also billions of people died in my cyborg conquest, so complaining about the KJA seems a little petty.
We waste trillions of dollars every year on war, once there’s no more war under my steel boot, $1 billion will pay for about 25 years of Mary Shelleys. That’s why I should be Emperor, I see the big picture, not penny-pinching.
This year, probably Martha Wells or Alastair Reynolds would get the Mary Shelley. I’d prefer to see a Murderbot novel before awarding that, but All Systems Red really earned it. Revenger and Shadow Captain have been excellent. Holly Lisle finally finished her Tales from the Longview series and I’m catching up; it’s an unpleasant future and characters I don’t like much, but it’s been compelling to keep reading (often the case with Holly), so perhaps when I finish the last one it will get a Shelley.
@37/AndyLove: “While Beta had a ridiculous president during Shards, at the same time, Barrayar is shown to have a monstrous Imperial heir abetted by equally monstrous nobles (balanced by some very noble nobles).”
Fair enough. I guess both societies are portrayed unflatteringly to some extent. And thanks for answering my question.
@swampyankee try my Ceres 2525?
The Galactic is a ConFed where each planet governs mostly unhindered. The ConFed is for joint military securuty, law, and trade standards.
But it’s setting framework, in the background for now as my hero/ines work through their arcs toward bigger & better things.
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@33 mdhughes
Your comments about Leckie’s work relieve me – I worried there was something wrong with me that I found it pretty much unreadable, myself, and I’ve tried three times due to the high accolades it has received…
Not everything can be to everyone’s taste!
Yeah, none of the books I mentioned are from Baen. For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve reviewed exactly one book by Baen since 2015 and that was because I misunderstood too late who published a particular ebook.
Said hiccups being of the form “except if the miscreant is a Vorkosigan or is a friend of the Vorkosigans.” Barrayan is a conservative society in the Wilhoitian sense:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect…
@47: Exactly the hiccups I was thinking of. However, the Vorkosigans are perfectly willing to sacrifice friends if it’s for what they consider to be the good of their society – Aral sacrificed a ship full of friends and one son of a friend. But if you’re a friend and possessor of knowledge that would be very useful, yeah, you’re easily off the hook for embezzlement (I suspect that even an enemy of the Vorkosigans in possession of such knowledge would also be off the hook – but the odds of being discovered as having that useful knowledge is much higher if you’re a friend).
Being the third leg of the love triangle involving the Vorkosigans – now that is deadly.
I don’t think Miles’ exes realize just how lucky they were to say no to him. Otherwise there might have been a series of tragic and entirely not Miles’ fault series of accidental blaster discharges, airlock failures, and lamentable incidents involving “very sharp cattle (grids) (and) an extremely heavy hat.”
@48: He slipped on an icy patch.” “He was decapitated.” “It was a very icy patch.”
As I think about it, even aristos who are enemies of the Vorkosigans get off fairly lightly – an ordinary person who trespasses, harasses and assaults a widow and her son would probably not merely be assigned a less desirable post (which he could leave merely by resigning his position in the military).
@48 only Tien died of inconvenient proximity to a romance plot. Though the only other triangle that comes to mind is Elena/Miles/Baz which went reasonably well for everyone involved.
@50 Except for Admiral Vorutywr, Prince Serg, Count Vordarrion, and that Cetagandan Satrap. Vormoncrief(?) isn’t an enemy, just a twit.
Don’t forget poor Taura, shuffled off-stage thanks to factors that are totally not Miles or Elaina’s fault.
That description seems to be a tremendous disservice to Taura’s character. She had an entire life to live and her romantic entanglement with Miles were only brief interludes. She isn’t shuffled off, she has better things to be doing than being Miles love interest.
Willw @8: the third book in that trilogy is on indefinite hold due to the clusterfsck I refer to as “the Scottish political singularity” which began in 2012 … and which is currently ongoing in the shape of Brexit. (It’s really hard to design a near future setting grounded in a real-world location when the place in question is going through a multi-year constitutional nervous breakdown with random eruptions of political WTF?!? along the way.)
I remember how historian Francis Fukuyama, who posited that the fall of the Soviet Union would usher in an era of enlightened liberal democracies and “the end of history.” Too bad he was wrong.
I always thought Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium was a great setting for drama and adventure. As a government it was absolutely reprehensible; a tenuous alliance between the US and Soviets that brought out the worst in both systems, constantly on the verge of falling apart, and fatally corrupt. If you want to put characters in jeopardy, which is at the heart of good drama, a terrible government is a good way to do it.
@51: Vorrutyr may count (Count?) as a part of a Vorkosigan love triangle (or at least an ex).
I like the Vorkosigans as characters, but as for the political system, vive le Lyudiyar libre.
So far nobody’s mentioned the Discworld.
“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
@23,
Emperors, at least those that are absolute rulers, can’t commit murder, as they define the laws. Emperors can, however be murdered.
I feel like you weren’t paying very close attention to exactly how and why that feudal planet got involved in an interstellar war which it lost so decisively they had to resort to literally suicidal tactics to cover their retreat.
Also, in the sequel, Barrayar has a civil war. Or I should say *another* civil war, because there are still people alive who remember Yuri. There are a lot of ways that governments can be evaluated, but “two civil wars in one ordinary human lifespan” seems like it ought to be a pretty major demerit.
Overall, Barrayar is an interesting place to read about but it would not be high on my list of places to live in that universe.
@62/chris: See my comment #42.
Yeah, there’s no democracy in space opera. Except for the Civilization of Smith’s Lensmen, the definitive space opera. Or the Federation of Star Trek. Or the Galactic Republic of Star Wars. Or the pre-coup Earth Alliance of Babylon-5. But apart from that…
Bujold has many democracies, Beta’s the most mentioned one. The quaddies seem some sort of genuinely worker-socialist. The action just mostly takes place in monarchies or gangland. Despite the hiccups in the first book, mostly resulting from Cordelia keeping secrets and acting oddly as an ex-POW in a universe where brainwashing is actually quite potent, Beta is the author-described “techno-socialist utopia” everyone else can be measured against.
Stasheff’s Warlock books are set in some SCA-derived lost colony that’s gone monarchical but the title character is a field agent for democracy.
To Like The Lightning isn’t really space opera but the “emperor’s” subjects can leave his jurisdiction at any time.
The fanfic To The Stars has some weird AI-mediated governance meant to emulate the results of a democracy if the voters were paying attention.
Starship Troopers had a democracy that is famously problematic in its franchise but still closer to democracy than empire.
Cherryh has Alliance, I think just plain democracy, and Union, a flawed democracy in many ways.
Alastair Reynolds has the Conjoiners, a positively-spun group-mind, and the Demarchists, a polity run by direct democracy via implants that poll your opinion without bothering you.
Joan Vinge’s earlier Demarchists were just a direct democracy with actual conventional voting.
Ken MacLeod’s _Learning the World_ is set in a democratic human space; I think it’s Civil Worlds setting.
David Wingrove and initial Chung Kuo series. Feudal imperium?
+1 for the Eternal Emperor.
+100 to the idea of a sequel to Halting State, which Is the most brilliant near future SF book ever.
no mention of the Iron Bitch? (Deathstalker)
@65. vasco: whatever happened with that? Did Wingrove ever finish the series?
@64, just that you reminded me of the chorus of “To Like the Lightning” :-) (The Cure, 1987)
“Hey hey hey
Well I like it when that lightning comes
Hey hey hey
Yes I like it a lot
Hey hey hey
Yes I’m jumping like a jumping jack
I’m dancing, screaming, itching, squealing, fever feeling
Hot hot hot”
Jake Bugg dealt with the subject more recently, but i’m not sure what he was on about. Probably a lady friend of the “blinding flash and a deafening report” kind, i.e. left him shocked, singed, and smiling…
…which reminds me too of the fan of Peter Sellers who wrote to ask for a singed photograph, and what ensued…
No mention of Scalzi’s most recent series, starting with The Decaying Empire? Or for that matter, of the actual Emperor in Asimov’s Galactic Empire (I think Cleon, in the time Seldon was alive)? Or the Emperor of the House of Orange in Heinlein’s Double Star? (The latter was the only emperor I know of to collect model trains!)
Heinlein had an interesting collection of absolute rulers; see also Star from Glory Road. For some reason, lots of SF/F authors like strong authoritarian systems of government. Maybe just because they’re easier to deal with?
David Weber has a constitutional monarch in the Honor Harrington universe (Manticore), along with bureaucratic states, dictatorships and and democracies (Beowulf).
Clarke has a government where leaders are drawn by lot (Songs of Distant Earth).
Certainly, some sf/f authors have some form of representative democracy in their futures; most of the space operas seem to eschew the idea of messy democracy for clean, simple, highly hierarchical systems of government.
The Radchai imperium is, at least, internally conflicted and corrupt as well as being mind-numbingly horrible to the peoples it conquers (and incredibly afraid of aliens….). Yoon Ha Lee’s hexarchate maintains power by, among other things, ritual torture.
“Empress, Deathless Leader, Protector, Supreme Monarch, That One Dude With All the Power: there are so many ways to arrange and govern the political entities of tomorrow!”
In which case – why do all the first four of those descriptions there seem to be close synonyms/euphemisms for the fifth? :-)
As other have already pointed out, though, science fiction does provide a far more diverse range of government systems than the case studies you have given – though it is very striking just how large a proportion of science fiction governments are indeed, at least in a technical or euphemistic sense, monarchies (and usually, at least by aspiration and/or at the start – and frequently the end – of the narration, absolute ones). And a large proportion of the rest seem to be, at least in practice, very narrow oligarchies (particularly when one considers that the number of people they are governing may well be in the trillions).
Of course, there are some good narrative reasons for this. If you are trying to write what is at least at some level an action adventure in a supposedly complex society but with either a single or small number of protagonists, you certainly can set it in a democracy (or at least something roughly as close as our contemporary world gets to democracy) – Infomocracy is a good recent example – but, as I have discovered in discussion with people without my level of interest in politics, a concentration on the tactical side of electioneering or on political debates beyond the level of eloquent set-piece speeches can then rather reduce the size of your enthusiastic readership.
Over in Japanese space opera, we have Legend of Galactic Heroes, with an empire vs. some federation. From the episodes I saw the empire is clearly bad; the federation seems decent internally but heading toward a demagogue coup.
Crest/Banner of the Stars has the Humankind Empire Abh (the Abh seem eager to reassure you that they’re human), though it’s a pretty bizarro empire, more of an interstellar trade monopoly run by an emperor/empress selected from a royal family by a council of retired emperors. Their opponents are allegedly more democratic, though the main one, United Mankind, seems more like the People’s Democratic Republic of Re-Education Camps and Political Officers; given a choice between the two I would likely pick being an Abh subject.
There are Gundam and Macross but I know little about the former. Macross Frontier showed democracy and the occasional coup d’etat going to the stars.
@67 Sunspear
For years and years I thought Chung Kuo 8 “Marriage of the living dark” was the end of the series! That he had just stopped writing anything. Then saw a new one “Son of heaven”, that is currently on my shelf waiting to be read, but seems to be a precursor of some type…
@Vasco: I never finished the series. But I remember DeVore as one of the most despicable and sadistic villains ever. Think I read somewhere that he turned out to be an alien, which if true is pretty jarring, since it seemed to be a human-only political conflict against the Seven Tangs (emperors).
The newer book you refer to seems to be a prequel to the original series. Think there was talk of Wingrove re-writing the whole sequence to get rid of the more outlandish elements. The plan may have been abandoned.