Far Future (2100+)

Scan the 40 works set beyond 2100 and a pattern emerges that nobody talks about enough: the further into the future a story reaches, the more its political structures regress. Bujold's Barrayar is explicitly feudal. Herbert's heirs loom over Simmons' Hyperion. Cherryh's Downbelow Station runs on mercantile fiefdoms. Niven's Ringworld has its hominid castes. Even Le Guin's anarchist Anarres in *The Dispossessed* defines itself against a propertarian world that looks like a company town with extra steps. The libertarian and democratic experiments cluster in the near-future band (Robinson's Mars, Bacigalupi's Bangkok); push past 2500 and you get emperors, hereditary military castes, and guild monopolies. The implicit argument across decades of uncoordinated authors is that democratic governance is a product of specific material conditions — namely, communication density and shared context — and that once you shatter those with interstellar distance, power reconsolidates along the oldest human lines: kinship, oath, and monopoly on violence. Stross's *Accelerando* is the rare exception that tries to narrate what happens when communication density *increases* without limit, and notably, it can't hold a stable political form for more than fifty pages at a stretch.