This is gonna get moved to Cafe Society, I’m sure.
But yeah, all those alien “princes” have at times annoyed me.
In some cases it’s used as a facile contrast to the humans’ own form of government, which is often set up as being vaguely republican or parliamentary. And it’s not as if a parliamentary republic is somehow “natural” and was inevitable that it would become the dominant structure; history could just as well have wound up with all of us living under a Caliphate. But in other cases it seems like it’s just done because they’d rather not have to bother with the idea that the leadership may win a major galactic war yet get booted out of office 6 months later because the middle class is experiencing layoffs.
Also, the monarchy jibes with another theme in much of SF which contrasts meritocracy with having some sort of natural or artificial “special gift”. Sometimes that is considered A Good Thing: call it being The One, having the Force with you, coming back from Zahadhum(sic), some sort of extra-special annointment from the gods gives you that extra “ooph” to be heroic. Or else, it’s set up for the opposite effect: to show how plain old regular joes get ahead with just brains, guts and luck (e.g. Kirk/Picard vs. just about every superpowered being you could throw at them).
However, there is one important component in the evolution of our well-known peerage that developed back in feudal times, that may be shared by deep space colonization: isolation.
In late Roman times, you had the Imperial family in Rome, and various Patrician or Rich Plebeian families attempting to jockey for power, but you did not have a hereditary “Duke of Syria” or “Count of Lusitania” or “Marquis of Mauretania”. When it all fell apart, THEN it became the practice to have the guy that you, the King, tasked with defending some land be granted that land in fief so that he could pass it and its wealth to his children and thus have a reason to stand and defend. A humanity scattered across interstellar distances may lose cohesion of centralized authority, and revert to franchising private individuals or corporations, in exchange for exploring and exploiting a planet, with the right to BE the Law there, and with the right to pass that power on to their estates. Once that has been going on for a while, it’s hard to tell those heirs “OK, renounce your power” unless you are backed by a large fleet bearing WMDs.
OTOH, there are reasons you should not discount a resurgence of monarchy – including some examples from history:
Anecdotal 1: Examples in Western history of what on the books was still a Republic turning into a monarchical “Empire”: Rome and France. In the first case, after almost 500 years of republican rule.
Anecdotal 2: Hereditary presidencies: the Kim Ils in North Korea, the Assads in Syria… but it need not be limited to dictatorial regimes, an ostensibly democratic process can still result in dynasties, e.g. the Nehru/Gandhi family in India.
So it’s not that hard to revert to “dynastic” rule even in nominal republics. Specially if the society is or became stratified along class or tribal lines. AND/OR if you have a society that has become convinced that only a clear, rigid hierarchy of strong men, on their own right OR having been annointed by untouchable, undisputed holy figureheads, but in any case unconcerned with winning votes, can really keep people’s meaner instincts at bay.
Anecdotal 3: Succesful restorations of monarchy? Spain, which went from fascist dictatorship to constitutional monarchy in 1975-78
Still all of this does not necessarily require a full feudal construct. After all, the Assads continue to call themselves “President”; the Kim Ils are outright monarchical, but they have at least the discretion to change the title to “Great Beloved Leader” and make everyone below that rank fully expendable so there’s no competition. The thing is, it’s simpler to assume that a reversion to dynastic rule will take place using the familiar terminology from royalties past, rather than develop a new one. After all many of our hereditary titles (Duke, Marquis, etc.) once upon a time actually had a meaning related to what these persons actually DID in the Roman/Frankish/Saxon power structure.
Hypothetical 1: Say that the world economy evolves in such a way that it’s the corporations who eventually rule the world to such an extent they dispense with the fiction of nation-states. Then you could have a "noble class’ of the kinds of people that end up in boards of directors, and a "royal class’ of the kinds of people who are founders, President-CEOs, Chairmen, Majority Owners, etc. People like the Forbes, the Fords, the Disneys would be the “Great Houses” – within which there could be coups and usurpations, e.g. Disney just these last days. maybe the word “Ceo” would become a word for a rank or station in society that attaches to you by virtue of, for instance, being the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son of Bill Gates.
Another possibility is that the people may decide that “politicians are corrupt” and the State is better run contracted out to a corporate technocracy, and eventually that becomes a self-perpetuating nondemocratic state.
Now, the most famous series that has taken the whole space feudalism/monarchy to its highest exppression is, of course Dune and its apparently inexhaustible progeny of sequels, prequels and sidequels. But at least in that universe they try to come up with a sort of justification in the backstory and understory.
