Check out the Culture series by Iain M Banks
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Protector by Larry Niven... I promise you it fits your requirements. But I don't want to spoil it
The whole Hainish Cycle from Ursula K Le Guin may fit here, in the sense that all human-like 'aliens' are the offsprings of the colonies planted by a primitive human civilization.
I love the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. There's of course the alien invasion trope, where aliens are space conquistadors pillaging the earth with their extra-terrestrial powers, and its complement, the Star Trek trope, where humans are culturally and technologically superior secular humanists descended to a backwards planet. And then there's this story.
This is one of my favorite short stories. Such a cool take on the alien invasion trope
The Bobiverse Series involves humanity (in a fashion) exploring the stars and occasionally meeting less advanced species.
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Stanistaw Lem's Fiasco. It's a depressing read but really solid, and easier than many of his other works.
This isn’t quite what you’re looking for, but it may scratch the itch: Deathworlders. Effectively, humans aren’t the most technically advanced at all, but our evolution (because we live on a “death world” or a normally “inhospital planet”) has lead us to be effectively unstoppable in comparison to all other intelligent life forms. It’s definitely a cool take, IMO. Read until you get to the hockey game before making your decision.
The story is free: https://deathworlders.com/
This “genre” is called “humans fuck yea” for reference.
It starts off good but gets really bogged down in its own waste after a while, IMO.
Alan Dean Foster wrote a series with basically the same premise in the 90s, where evil mind control telepath aliens were waging a war against a bunch of free alien species, and the free alien species were hampered by the fact that very few aliens were capable of fighting at all, let alone effectively, but the evil telepath aliens could mind control their conquered subjects into fighting anyway. And then the losing free aliens find humans, who are basically xenomorphs crossed with hannibal lecter compared to the aliens and conveniently immune to telepathy, and they realize that humans will fight to the death for dumb shit like precious metals.
H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy series. It's been a long while since I read them, but I remember them being good.
The first one, Little Fuzzy, is one of my favorite books of all time. The rest are less good? but still decent? Steer clear of Scalzi's "remake" though, it's trash.
Brandon Sanderson's Starsight series might be worth a look in. It seems like the Humans are not advanced at the start, but there's more to it than that.
I'm sure you'll be familiar with Star Trek and Star Wars universes they both have a lot of books. I haven't read any Trek novels, but on the Star Wars front, I'd recommend the XWing Series.
John Scalzi's Old Man's War should also be on this list. A fantastic little series.
Hmm, looking back at these, they're all pretty light reading/a little YA. I wonder whether there's some harder Science Fiction that'd fit these criteria that I haven't thought of?
Stargate SG-1 The power of a FN P90 in the hands of NATO forces trumps any so called advanced alien civilization
!Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary!
Could you put an spoiler alert on the top of your comment? The alien revelation is one of the big surprises in the book
I added the spoiler, and it fucked up my whole comment.