Literature / Behold, Humanity!

"Behold, Humanity!"

— Everyone

Behold Humanity is a series of science fiction novels by Ralts Bloodthorne, originally published on Reddit under the Title First Contact. The story begins with First Contact between the Terran Confederacy of Allied Systems and the Unified Galactic Councils, as well as several subsequent contact events as explorers from each side bump into one another. From there events quickly escalate as the story follows characters from both sides through the chaos that follows. As well as diving into the history of both civilizations and the galaxy as a whole.

The series dips into many genres but can probably be best defined as Military Science Fiction.

Warning, due to the series impressive length and large number of plot twist some unmarked spoilers may lurk below.

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Behold Humanity contains examples of:

• Abusive Precursors: Depending on how you define precursors there were a lot of them and they were all pretty terrible.

• AI Is A Crap Shoot: Any Artificial Intelligence created by humans becomes omnicidal. AI created by other species have shown that the PAWM AI are able to grow beyond their programming. They can disregard their previous masters and are willing to engage in negotiations with the Confederacy in the interest of self preservation.

• Alien Catnip: Tobacco (or nicotine products) as well as ice cream created a sexual and cultural revolution for the Treana'ad. Nicotine based products helped mask the pheremones of the species and ice cream helped with their urges to kill upon mating. Ice cream is treated as like a drug- a little isn't so bad but huge amounts can cause hallucinations, euphoria, and delusions of grandeur.

• Beware the Silly Ones: The Treana'ad self describe as "a silly nervous people" and their obsession with Ice cream, cows and hats makes them seem like big goofy insects at times. They are also one of the fastest breeding species in the galaxy with a dedicated soldier subspecies that consists of 11 foot tall preying mantises that can charge at 50 mph in full armor for hours.
  • In a setting where Humanity Is Special might actually be a property of the universe and Humans Are Warriors is definitely in effect, the Treana'ad won over a quarter of all ground engagements during their war with humanity. A record that has stood for almost 9,000 years.
  • Humans themselves. A common occurrence is a new species running into humans for the first time thinks "I can take these silly hedonistic lemurs" only to have it be proven to them that they can't. This is called the Prime Misconception.

• Clarke's Third Law: Discussed at times. Various races know that the things that humanity can do is done via some form of technology, however the technology is able to do incredible and impossible things, which leads many to decide that it isn't magic but it might as well be.
  • The story contains traces of all of Clarke's Laws

• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Digital Omnimessiah (who is code given flesh and capable of miracles) and the 12 Biological Apostles.

• Culture Clash: Par for course when you are dealing with aliens/humans.
  • Humans Are Cthulhu: Just the idea of human thought bewilders the Atrekna and the Lanktallan. They learn to live with it.
  • Humanity Is Infectious: All species that encounter humans have their culture altered by humanity.
  • Humans Are Special: To the point that others think that the malevolent universe created humans as the ultimate cleanser.
  • Humans Are Warriors: YES. Humans made up roughly 85% of the Confederacy forces. And anyone that faces humans lose. Only the Treana'ad can claim any sort of victory- they won nearly 30% of all battles.

• Defeat Equals Friendship: A surprisingly large amount of Humanity's closest allies started this way.
  • In the case of the Treana'ad it was more like armistice agreements and mutually beneficial trade deals equal friendship.

• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Most advanced races eventually figure out at least one way of doing this. Terrans figured out all of them.

• End of an Age: Dreams of Something More fears that the war with the Lanaktallan will cause the collapse of the confederacy.

• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Any world infested by the Dwellerspawn quickly becomes this.

• Hostile Terraforming: The Dwellerspawn do this to any world their spores land on in preparation for consuming the biosphere.
  • Terrans have a weapon based on the Genesis Device that turns targeted worlds into exact copies of Terra, minus the animals.

• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The setting contains multiple extra-dimensional means of faster than light travel and several of them fit this trope.
  • Hyperspace: ironically hyperspace is not actually that bad, although digital lifeforms require special precautions to move through it without damage.
  • Deadspace: A timeless purple void where size is arbitrary and death is impossible. Only a few groups use this to travel and most others consider them nothing but scary myths.
  • Hellspace: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Only the Precursor war machines, the Crusades of Wrath and Lawyers use it.

• In Harmony with Nature: Wood elves are this by definition.

• Lovecraft Lite: The number of dangerous aliens and apocalyptic phenomena they have encountered has convinced most of the Confederacy races that the universe is actively hostile to peaceful life. Multiple races have been wiped out or suffered fates worse than death at the hands of eldritch horrors and only the Confederacy's advanced technology and determination has prevented them from suffering the same fate on multiple occasions.

• Mile-Long Ship:
  • Seems to be standard for the setting. Outside of personal civilian craft the smallest vessels seem to reach at least a kilometer in length. Confederate dreadnoughts and Leviathan class executor craft are over 30 kilometers long.
  • And then there are the Goliath class precursor vessels. Which sit around 3,000 kilometers.

• Really 700 Years Old: Average human lifespan is around 500 years. Even though humans have cloning technology and genetic engineering, the mental engrams will breakdown. The human Casey is over 1,000 years old but he cites it as because of things you don't want to know about. The remaining Biological Apostles are around 8 to 9 thousand years old. Technically speaking, Dee is the oldest since she's around 10,000 years old (she grew up during the Great Depression) but many of those years were spent in stasis.

• Reference Overdosed: You would be hard pressed to find a chapter that doesn't reference something. However Tropes Are Tools and Legend Fades to Myth is in full effect here- since the story takes place around the year 10,000 AD, the origin of many references has been lost but the meaning still exists. There is also Rule of Cool in effect- things sounded cool and nobody cared if it was real or not, they made it reality.

• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Pretty thoroughly averted. Humanoids are somewhat common but range from bipedal foxes to giant lizards, and many races have insect-like bodies or border on starfish aliens.
  • There is one case of this but neither of the species in question is remotely human. The Treana'ad and the Mantids both resemble giant preying mantises with the only major difference in their appearance being their size and coloration.
  • Interestingly enough, humanity plays with this idea due to genetic manipulation and other crazy human tech. Humans can look like humans or they can look like Cthulu-esque abominations (like Sandy).

• Starfish Aliens: The Margite are a horde of giant, silicon-based, starfish-Shaped, space locusts.

• Time Abyss: The Atrekna and the PAWM measure their lifespans in the millions of years. This makes sense because one of them are the "masters of temporal mechanics" and the other is a machine.