DOGEdness as the sincerest form of flattery

A couple of days ago, Vladislav Davankov, former candidate in the 2024 Russian presidential, ahem, acclamation, and overall a pretty decent man as far as it is possible for a politician in the court of Federal Emperor Putin,

wrote a post in Telegram. He, like me, is cautiously optimistic about Trump’s initiatives that caused such a mental breakdown of American progressives and European bureaucracy (to say nothing about Ukrainians) this week.

One proposal of his seems especially provocative to me: to create a Federal Agency of Effectiveness in Russia, where, according to his estimations, work of ca. 1/3 of all federal servicemen could be optimized with the help of nascent (and further developing) AI. Davankov welcomes Musk in Russia for sharing of experiences.

I can only imagine the measure of histrionic personality disorders that may induce in progressive circles, to say nothing about European bureaucratic grubs.

Sure, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I recalled at once CoDominium setting, mentioned in passing in the brilliant SF novel, The Mote in God’s Eye, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, and explored in detail in its prequels, Falkenberg’s Legion, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell The Spartans, and Prince of Sparta, written by Pournelle and S. M. Stirling. About CoDominium from our alternate history of the future which now lies in the past, Wikipedia cheerfully informs:

The CoDominium is an uneasy formal alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union which holds power over Earth, with a cynically hegemonistic foreign policy…

Which comes as expected, because four prequels, timed by the life of Lysander the Great, founder of the First Empire of Man, were inspired in part by The Prince by Machiavelli. Recent actions of Donald Trump, who with dazzling speed shook American governmental hive to the core, also have a parallel in Machiavelli’s primer, namely, in Chapter 21:

… his achievements and designs have always been great, and have kept the minds of his people in suspense and admiration and occupied with the issue of them. And his actions have arisen in such a way, one out of the other, that men have never been given time to work steadily against him.

If perchance you haven’t read The Mote in God’s Eye, give a try. Nice political satire on American Republic transitioning into the Empire, as well as interesting discourse on the deep Malthusian urges of the sentient species.

Some truly alien xenos there, too.

The bifurcation point is obviously between 1991 and 1993, when interstellar drive is discovered and (this is, sure, a later retcon by Pournelle & Stirling) the USSR is saved from collapse during successful coup of Unionist fraction.

The First Contact with alien civilization is in 3017. In between, the CoDominium and the First Empire of Man have time to fall, coalesce anew, and fall again. Mind you, the first, and the best, novel of the sequence had been written earlier than the Star Wars saw the light of screen, by a wide margin.

Modern tech moguls often read science fiction and space opera books with more passion than bland mainstream novels, and that’s undeniably a good thing in many cases.

In other situations, maybe not so good, but, as Robert Penn Warren once quipped, one have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

This particular observation serves also as an epigraph to Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky Brothers, a novel that has a cult following across the xUSSR, including, but not limited to, the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In turn, many Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian writers became (quite poor) epigones of Strugatsky Brothers, thus stalling greatly the development of modern Russian science fiction.

In yet another turn, another novel by Brothers, known in the West as Prisoners of Power, provided a source of hackneyed analogies between Kremlin mature Putinism and quasi-mafia regime of the hidden rulers of a totalitarian state on a previously unexplored planet Saraksh, known as the Unknown Fathers.

I, for me, much prefer Niven and Pournelle duo’s works over the output of Strugatsky Brothers’ poor imitators. Some of countless fanfics based on works of Arkady and Boris could be only recommended to burn before writing.

I would also like to know whether somewhere in Zhongnanhai someone is now turning the pages of Chinese translation of The Mote in God’s Eye, if such an edition even exists.