this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Foundation or Dune pop immediately into my mind. Asimov has an interesting view of humanity. As does Herbert. No aliens really in those books though. Honor Harrington series is also about humanity’s dominance in space. Edit thanks saintwacko for the correction lol
Interestingly, the trend in 1940s SF was for humans to always be superior to aliens; John W. Campbell, the editor for Astounding, particularly liked this view. Asimov hated this trend, so that's why the Foundation series has no aliens in it; as a result he could sell the stories to Campbell without having to write about the inferiority of aliens. It's also why Asimov wrote a lot of three-law robot stories at this time, as he didn't mind writing humans to be superior to robots.
Honor* Harrington
Forgive me if I am uninformed, as it has been a while since I read Dune and I never read the complete series, but that universe doesn't have aliens in it, does it?
Does Foundation have any either? I've only watched the series on Apple TV (which I know is very divergent from the books) but it also seems to involve mainly humans and their creations than anything else.
No, you are correct. Both series are in the Humans are the only sentient space civ camp.
If you want to split hairs, it's said that it seems like sandworms weren't originally native to Arrakis and had to have originated elsewhere.
Where they were from originally and who brought them there is never really gone into, it could potentially have been aliens, or given how far in the future takes place it could have been previously human settlers who died out and been lost to history thousands of years prior to the events of the book.
You could also probably really get into it about whether some of the tleilaxu creations really count as humans.
Even in the latter books when the people from the scattering return from distant galaxies there is still no sign of any other sentient species.
Certainly there's no evidence of other civilizations, but space and time are vast, other civilizations could have risen and fallen before humanity ever came to be and evidence of their existence lost to time. They could exist in places humans wouldn't look, possibly even in forms we wouldn't recognize, or maybe they even purposely avoid us, folding space and time around themselves, hiding from prescient vision, etc. Maybe they're even out there and humanity is aware of them and they just have nothing we want and they're not posing a threat so they're never really worth talking about in-universe, certainly wouldn't be the first time humans didn't give a shit about another civilization, not even the first time in the scale of the books like how the harkonens never game much serious consideration to the fremen.
That's of course all just baseless speculation based on basically nothing in the books, pretty much just the old "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" thing.
Also, depending on what we're willing to accept as a sentient species, what your interpretation of the butlerian jihad is, how you feel about Brian's books, etc. there's also the matter of thinking machines to consider. I'd personally call that a stretch, but we're here talking about a weird sci Fi book, so weird sci Fi stuff isn't off the table.
I've read both and while I agree both series are great (though Dune gets really weird in the later books), this is not what I'm after. I'll check out Honor Harrington (I assume that's what you meant, Hunter found me some tennis dude.
The Honor Harrington series actually has some interesting tech disparities, besides being pretty good/exciting military science fiction.
In the first book, there are Bronze-Age-ish aboriginals.
In the second book, you see several human polities. Harrington interacts with less technologically/culturally developed groups of humans, and there are frictions and opportunities coming from the more advanced polity.
Harrington's polity generally remains the most technologically advanced group. There's later interaction with human polities who had thought they were the top dog, in terms of military power.
Just to note, it's a big series that gets somewhat too sprawling in the later books. The earlier books are Age of Sail (IN SPACE!!!) adventures, which transforms into a wide-ranging interstellar war driven by technology change. Weber's analogy is sailing ships -> steam ironclads -> Dreadnaught battleships -> WW2 radar directed gunnery / aircraft carriers. Not everyone is at the same tech level.
I ended up hating the books by the end. It felt like no one was keeping Weber's need to info dump in check. He also let his tendency to write bad guys with no redeeming qualities get out of hand. It felt like a complete drag at the end as when the political situation escalated the tech gap meant that there wasn't as much risk for Manticore.
Age of Sail (In space!) is an apt description since Weber directly paid homage to the Horatio Hornblower books he modeled the initial books off of by giving his main character the same initials.