Science Fiction

Stanislav lem has a couple books about it.

The video game X3. Of the races in the game, two of them are human. One is the Argon, descendants of a group of humans flung across the galaxy hundreds of years ago and developed into their own little niche. And then the actual Terrans, who somehow managed to develop technology much more advanced than the Commonwealth (what the collection of Argon, Split, Paranid and Teladi are called, since they mostly all work together peacefully) without even having the ability for warp travel, only making contact with the rest of populated space because of a disaster that linked one of their catapults with the network of ancient gates that have been the primary means of exploration.

While they have better shielding, faster thrusters, and devastating weaponry, they are completely lacking in economy, having control of just a single star system against factions that have control of most of known space. The game's actual economy ends up reflecting this quite hard, and the terrans are usually bankrupt super quickly unless you mod the game to give them some support.

HFY fare is a coin toss.

The Jenkinsverse rapidly goes from humans being assumed nonsentient (because our planet is a deathtrap) to cheating our asses off with galactic-standard technology. For example: teleportation is possible, but only between pre-set endpoints, and with a lengthy charge-up. So humans crammed obscenely large capacitors into standard hulls and instantly bip between microsatellites. Our ships have no staying power, but they're absolutely infuriating to fight.

Our main problem is being 99% confined to one vulnerable rock.

"Songs of a Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke

!hfy@lemmy.world

There are quite a few series where humans are on about the same level as most of the other aliens except for one specific race that's way more advanced but driven by some weird internal logic that keeps them from lording it over everyone - John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" and Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Architects" e.g.

Some episodes of Star Trek

I have seen some recommending Star Trek but you should know that the humans there have about as much in common with modern humanity as the other races. I wouldn't count it even though I love Star Trek and watched all of it.

In Strata Humans are basically god level advanced.

All humans are immortal and they terraform planets, and entire star systems, on an industrial scale.

Uplift novels. Been years since I read them. All I remember is humans uplifting other species to sentience. Guess it is time for a reread.

Edit, clearly I remember wrong how this one went. Sorry

star wars

district 9

plus others as have been mentioned.