A similar theme to Adrian Tchaikocsky's most recent standalone work "Alien Clay". I saw on a podcast that he said that in Alien Clay, he started from the reasoning 'What if life developed not with competitive natural selection, but in a maximally cooperative fashion, where every organism is capable of cooperation with any other corporation of organisms', and here is another variant of that theme - or perhaps its opposite, 'What if life was entirely one species'. Very nice.
Also he does love his evil, totalitarian states. Here it's the Concern. In Alien Clay it's the Mandate. I think his name for the philosophy in his Tyrant Philosophers series is very clever: Perfection. The fascist ersatz-Imperial-Britain-copies pursue a doctrine they call Perfection - which is obviously what every monomaniacal totalitarian pursues, the word they'd give to their philosophy is always best translated as Perfection.
Also he does love his evil, totalitarian states. Here it's the Concern. In Alien Clay it's the Mandate. I think his name for the philosophy in his Tyrant Philosophers series is very clever: Perfection. The fascist ersatz-Imperial-Britain-copies pursue a doctrine they call Perfection - which is obviously what every monomaniacal totalitarian pursues, the word they'd give to their philosophy is always best translated as Perfection.