Books

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.

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.

Starship Troopers by Heinlein. Not at all like the movie. Pretty restrained, thoughtful, even meditative on war, fascism, military. One of my favorites.

The Uplift series by David Brin is kinda like this. We're not top of the pile, but a disruptive force in the intergalactic society.

Old Man's War series by John Scalzi. Humans are one of the newer space faring species but we are quickly becoming the most dominant group. Genetic engineering being a specialty. There are a few ascended species who are more advanced but they don't really interact with the general galaxy anymore.

It's criminal that no one has mentioned District 9 yet.

I would understand people ignoring it because of the fact that there is a space ship and they have tech, but the setting is ultimately about how the aliens completely need humanity's help. There is a certain pairity in the movie since they are refugees with some better technology.

But anyway, it has a tremendous story, great action, pulls on the heart strings, super imaginitive idea of aliens being stuck on earth.

Joe Haldeman - The Forever War

The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove, about aliens trying to invade Earth and finding out there the less advanced race here

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card The Noon series by the Strugatsky brothers The Culture series by Iain M Banks (the protagonists are not humans, but a multi-species civilisation that includes humans) Strata by Terry Pratchett

A Fire Upon the Deep

One of my favorite Sci-fi series books is the Ender's game saga. I think this might meet your specifications. Don't watch the movie! The book, as is often the case, is way better.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, author of The Martian.

Children of Time sort of fits in. Also if you liked the Ender's Game sequels and how he handled how aliens can truly be alien and the difficulty of aliens to communicate to each other you'll most likely like the whole series by Adrian Tchaikovksy, and most likely some of his other sci-fi books.

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.

In “The Gods Themselves” by Isaac Asimov humans and the aliens are about equal (at least for the purposes of the story), though they don’t share the same universe. I find the idea he explores interesting, but if you’re looking for a story on how humans treat ‘lesser’ beings, this isn’t for you.

Speaker For the Dead is one of my favorite books of all time, which is exactly this concept.

I highly recommend reading Ender's Game first, which is also an easy read.

The author won two Hugo awards for two books in a row (I think the first ever), but only wrote Ender's Game to flesh out the backstory for Speaker for the Dead.

Both excellent books with the latter particularly so.

In most any Star Trek episode where the Prime Directive is relevant, the humans have encountered primitive (pre-warp) aliens. Usually, some disastrous problem has befallen the aliens that the humans' technology can easily solve, and the humans must struggle to decide whether to help and bear the consequences (both legal and practical) of intervening, or leave the aliens to their fate as the Directive demands.

I think Mars Attacks counts, although perhaps the humans and aliens were portrayed as being equally stupid 😄

EDIT: did not realise I was posting in a books group. Just came up in my main feed. Anyway Ima leave Mars Attacks here in case anybody forgot about this excellent film.

r/HFY has a plethora of such (short) stories. HFY stands for Humanity Fuck Yeah. Sadly I am yet to find an active HFY community/magazine on lemmy/kbin

Speaker for the dead

@rikudou
For a deeper philosophical spin on the idea, you might try "The Mote In God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi.

Terran Republic series by Charles Gannon has humans more advanced than one or two, but definitely not at the top of the pack.

Sector General by James White has humans as part of the large alliance of races. The alliance is more advanced than some of the races they encounter.

Foreigner series by C J Cherryh has humans far more technologically advanced, however the small number that reach the alien world have to learn to live peacefully with the aliens.

Most of the Stars wars books have humans as very advanced.

The 'known space' universe by Larry niven has humans at least as sort of equal. Lower than some life forms, but on par or higher than some.

I recommend starting with the ringworld series.

Warhammer 40k also has humans as a dominant species from what I've gathered. I've tried to get into the lore, but it's massive amounts and no clear "start here" so Iv'e just picked up snippets.

The Damned Trilogy for sure!

Basically humans are stumbled upon during a long intergalactic war and end up being the entire key to winning it. Really no way else to describe it without giving things away.

If you is talking about the intellectual aspect The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a good one. The only thing that aliens are more developed than humans are in the technology, but their smartness are kinda average and similar to human standards. Sometimes they're even stupid.

I recently read the short story The Long Game by Ann Leckie - it presents quite a large gap in capability between species.