this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2021
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In sci-fi, humanity tends to start off completely powerless and ignorant of alien life, yet by the end, they become a leading power. Star Trek, despite being my favorite sci-fi, is especially guilty of this. IMO it's kind of narcissistic, and more so, boring. I'd like to see more sci-fi that focuses mainly on aliens, their culture, interactions, problems and solutions, which is why in the sci-fi universe I'm worldbuilding, humans aren't even mentioned.
I honestly think the entire space opera genre is one big boring cliche - humans being present or not.
You might like the book Children of Time though. It does feature humans as a extremely developed species, but they end up destroying themselves with some unlikely result of an uplift experiment taking their place.
I definitely have a soft spot for space opera, even so, I do have to admit it can get cliched at times. Still, IMO not all cliches are objectively bad, they're used a lot because a lot of people do like seeing them.
I also love how they portray aliens in an alien invasion as evil incarnate, as if humans would act differently in such a scenario.
If the new rover finds life on Mars, we'll end up killing it. Change my mind.
I don't think they will kill it but you can bet a fortune on them locking the thing up in a box for research.
Anything that survived Mars becoming as inhospitable as it is right now, will be sturdy as hell and we probably don't need to worry too much about it (until massive terraforming of Mars would be attempted).
I think you'll love Asimov's Foundation Saga if you haven't read it already, he precisely focuses on these aspects and when he talks about humans the new perspective is often funny, I'm not really stating a cliche my bad but do check it out if and when you get time. I came across an animated series haven't really seen it but from reviews feels like it's gonna have Asimov feels Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Fair enough. I really do like Star Trek's leftist messages, and I'm trying to replicate that first and foremost in my own writing.
the problem with non-human-centric plots is selling them. few want to read about non-humans.
I mean, there are entire book series about sapient cats (Warriors by Erin Hunter), rabbits (Watership Down), forest creatures in general (Redwall) etc. The spinoff game series Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (which is where my profile picture comes from), focuses entirely on a world inhabited only by Pokemon, and it's massively popular.
But even then all of these beings have human problems and human like personalities, and voices. I think this is the difficulty in writing non human tales, is that the tales that most people empathize with, no matter how alien their premise or characters may be, still end up centering around human like traits and problems.
Check Beastars.
But these are essentially humans dressed up in fur suits. They have human attributes, human voices, even humanoid shapes.
Not exactly. It is true that they are human-like at certain level but the series is very centric about their non-human instinct influence in their life.
The series is well classified as a human drama with animals. There is a fact and is that there are humans in the same world too (but away of the main series as far I remember). The rest are just non-human animals with attributes that you use to give only to humans.