this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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The following book settings/series should work.
I love the Altered Carbon book series. Each book has its own very different story where even the main character is in a different body, on a different planet, dealing with different kinds of people. The first book is very cyberpunk detective noir.
The first season of the Netflix series captured that aesthetic very well. My only critique was how they mish-mashed some stuff from all three books and added a new character at the final antagonist. The second season is not good. The whole series also changed the ideology and back story of this revolutionary group and the main character's relation to them.
Read the books. They are a blast.
40K doesn't really fit. While humanity isn't the least advanced civilization in that universe, it's also far from technological dominance (especially considering 10 000 years of stagnation following Horus' Hoolabooga). I mean, even the vagina faced fish are more advanced than the Imperium!
It took me way to long to figure out you were talking a out the Tau. I have never heard them described like that and will never be able to look at them the same again.
It's a combination of two common jokes about them. The vagina-face one is pretty obvious (y'know, the slit), as far as I know, the fish joke comes from the designations for their vehicles (although these are in-universe Imperial designations, kinda like the Hind is a NATO designation for a Soviet aircraft)
I think The Expanse, while an amazing series that should be read anyway, doesn't fit the bill of "humans are more advanced than the aliens", since the Protomolecule and everything created by the Romans are essentially in the "tech as high level magic" category. Humans can't even understand the technology, often saying things like, the Protomolecule just changed the laws of physics.
I don't see how The Expanse fits this brief in anyway. Could you explain? To me The Expanse is humans butting up against some alien tech which squarely falls into the realms of being an outside-context problem.
By the epilogue chapter in the last book you could maybe argue they've finally mastered it. But even then we only see a snapshot.
To me, the alien tech was abandoned and only really significant as fuel for what the true story is. There is no humans versus aliens as a main story best until the very end, and even then humans have the upper hand. The main story beat throughout is human versus human, even in the epilogue we find out that the conflicts continued.
Yeah, but that doesn't really make it humans are the most powerful species. Just that they're a kid that found a loaded gun and decided to shoot themselves in the face with it.
I don't necessarily agree with you since I interpret OP's request differently, but ultimately that's up to them to decide if it fits the bill. That said "...kid that found a loaded gun and decided to shoot themselves in the face with it" is glorious and a perfect encapsulation of the premise. It's like what happened in The Gods Must Be Crazy when they find the coke bottle. Before long, humans start bashing others upside the head with it. It's what we do.