What the title says, I’m tired of the trope where humans are the least advanced in the universe.
I’d like to read something different where we’re the more advanced ones (not necessarily the most advanced). As an example I quite enjoyed the Ender’s Game sequels and the angle of us being the more advanced ones was quite interesting.
Do you have any recommendations?
Project hail Mary was cool in the fact that it was just so… Different. Won’t say too much to avoid spoilers, but I think it’ll tick your boxes.
The culture series? It’s not outright said they’re human, but they’re clearly human. And they outscale basically every single thing in the universe. Or at least in the first few books. Might change later.
In Excession it felt more like
spoiler
The Culture is a race of intelligent starships that keeps humans as pets.
If you haven’t read The Culture by Iain Banks, it’s among the best and most enjoyable sci-fi ever, in my opinion. The humans of the culture are quite near the most advanced in the universe, but there are entities more advanced, their own AI ships, prominently, but other species too that chose to “sublime” and exist outside of the normal universe, but because of that such ones are ever barely around. The humans of the culture could evolve that far too, but didn’t choose to do so yet in the series.
My understanding is that the ‘humans’ of The Culture are a genetic melange of several different, but similar species who decided to merge with one another. They essentially chose the best genetic traits of each species and ran with those. It should be noted that Earth is not a part of The Culture, if it matters to OP that the humans in the story are Earthlings or not.
The Bobiverse series eventually features some aliens. I don’t think that’s a spoiler at all… But they aren’t space-faring, so I dunno if that counts for what you’re looking for.
I have a question about this series; I read maybe a third of the first book and so far it has felt a bit…i dunno, corny? So far the humor feels a little like low-hanging fruit and I have a hard time connecting with the main character because he’s just a mind and doesn’t seem to have much agency at this point. The larger world seems interesting and there’s plenty of mystery still but should I keep going or is it kinda more of the same?
Not trying to shit on it, I know a lot of people love it and I see it recommended all the time, and likewise it took me some getting used to the kind of goofiness of other series like Expeditionary Force, but just wondering if anyone else felt the same as me at first.
How you are viewing the book is incredibly valid.
The one way that I have come up with to describe a potential reason for the way the story is portrayed is this:
The ENTIRE series is from the perspective of a die hard semi-introverted software engineer and HUGE NERD who has this deep-seated need of just wanting to help and make things better.
Taking that into account everything written kind of states to make sense.
I love the series and it goes to some VERY interesting places.
There is one warning to give. At a certain point the book starts to suffer from scale creep. The characters are already able to do “X” so we need an enemy that can do “X+Y+Z” so now character learns to do "X+Y+Z TIME 10²“. At a certain point it’s best to just stop worrying about the explanations and just enjoy the story.
Highly recommend.
The ENTIRE series is from the perspective of a die hard semi-introverted software engineer and HUGE NERD who has this deep seeded need of just wanting to help and make things better.
TBH this makes it sound a lot like Ready Player One which I thought was quite bad, and I was getting similar sort of over-laden with pop culture references vibe here as well, but I’m willing to get it a bit more of a shot I think.
Starship Troopers by Heinlein. Not at all like the movie. Pretty restrained, thoughtful, even meditative on war, fascism, military. One of my favorites.
Seconded. In @davidbrin@mastodon.social Brin’s series humans are basically the only race that managed to uplift themselves making them a galactic oddball.
