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 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.
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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.