Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol novels, as I recall, provide some backstory for the feudal government in a very advanced civilization with a lot of transhuman tech. The upper class in this society even went out of its way to find the remaining plausible pretenders to royal status, so it made an heir of Tonga’s royal family as the queen, and married her to the survivor of some obscure noble family in Catalonia. McCarthy argues that this arrangement would provide stability and reduce the waste of resources on politics because the queen and her consort, like everyone else, would live for really long times and exploit the human tendency to form dominance hierarchies.
Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol novels, as I recall, provide some backstory for the feudal government in a very advanced civilization with a lot of transhuman tech. The upper class in this society even went out of its way to find the remaining plausible pretenders to royal status, so it made an heir of Tonga’s royal family as the queen, and married her to the survivor of some obscure noble family in Catalonia. McCarthy argues that this arrangement would provide stability and reduce the waste of resources on politics because the queen and her consort, like everyone else, would live for really long times and exploit the human tendency to form dominance hierarchies.