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.
“Space opera” is more like Star Wars. I’m not sure I’d call Star Trek a space opera.
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.