Hyperion by Dan Simmons
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Little Fuzzy books by H. Beam Piper.
1st one is public domain:
The galaxies edge series is not bad. Lots of military porn though if that's not your thing.
It's kind of star wars ish with the alien races all living together with humans, but humans overall are the ruling force.
Yeah, sorry for promoting reddit here, but this subreddit is exactly what you are looking for. And I mean exactly. It is a collection of stories about humans being awesome, usually in a fantasy or sci-fi setting.
If you do not have a life I can recommend The Deathworlders, which was started there and is also available as an ebook on https://deathworlders.com/ . A personal favorite of mine is "Amelia's Last Battle" and "Humanities Debt", which are two short stories and do not take a year of dedicated reading to complete. I have also read "Bought and Sold", "sexy space babes" (contains nsfw), "Chrysalis", and more.
I can also recommend going through their wiki, which has a list of all completed stories. This is probably the best page to start: https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/ref/must_read
The only caveat is that people there are amateur writers. Some stories are never completed and the quality differs between "well, at least they're learning how to write" to godlike (e.g. the Deathworlders)
Edit: I see plenty of people already recommended the subreddit XD
I hope mentioning some of the stories I enjoyed does add value here.
I saw you mentioning that you want professional books. I can understand that the format (reddit posts) is not suited for offline reading or printing. This can be very annoying, I agree. But in terms of quality: there are some really good writers there. Buying the book in a physical store or on the internet doesn't change the words that are written.
If you like things that are on the less serious side, the Humans Are Weird series by Betty Adams is hilarious, adorable, lighthearted, and fun. Usually written from the perspective of the various aliens, and she does a damn good job of it too. Been reading I Have the Data with friends, and it's been a grand time
I know it's not exactly what you asked but "To sleep in a sea of stars" by Christopher Paolini has humans at almost comparable with the aliens they interact with. Humans are slightly outclassed by the aliens in ship speed but the rest of the technology seems roughly comparable, with humans having better missile tech. It feels more like humans will lose a war of attrition if something major isn't done, not being completely outclassed.
I just enjoyed the book so much I'm recommending it regardless of the tech differences not quite aligning to the question.
I just finished this book the other day.
I found it about 400 pages too long, but the aspect of the humans being at least on par with the jellies was refreshing.
Funny thing, this is the book which prompted me to write the original post. I'm halfway through, but:
spoiler
there are the ancient ones which so far seem to be basically god-like and the jelly ones are better than humans as well, though not by that much.
Academy series, by Jack McDevitt. Although there are more advanced species mentioned, they've all died off.
Alex Benedict series, by Jack McDevitt again. There's only two species of intelligences in this series, and they're of roughly equal status.
If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like "humans are space orcs", " earth is a deathworld", "earth is space australia" - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don't need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.
Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names "made alien" by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they're free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.
I know referring people to Reddit is generally considered bad form around here, but check out reddit's r/hfy. It's mostly amateur stuff, but the subreddit centers around people writing stories about humans being good at something. I haven't taken a look at it in a while, but some of the series I used to enjoy are: First Contact (the ralts_bloodthorne one), the Deathworlders (spawned the Deathworlders trope on TV tropes), Debris (ausnerd), Transcripts (squiggle story studios), They Are Smol (this is a god-tier scifi shitpost series by tinypracinghorse) along with its companion series The Smol Detective (frank leroux), and anything by regallegaleagle like Memories of Creature 88, Billy-Bob Space Trucker and Material Differences.
Hmm, that's an interesting perspective I never heard about. Bump.
A few that I can recommend are:
- Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams
- Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
- Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan