Damocles by SG Redling.
Basically, humans make first contact by going elsewhere.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Protector by Larry Niven, it's exactly what you want with a twist. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's worth the read.
I’m reading Embassytown by China Mieville right now and it’s very much that. It’s also really good so far, but I’m only half way through.
The polity series, I mean I suppose we're the less advanced race if you count our AI, but it basically dominates all species except every now and then some retro species that makes a comeback.
The short story Three worlds collide (read for free at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 ) has humanity at the middle of an interspecies first-contact triangle with a more and a less advanced race.
David Weber’s Honorverse and Mother of Demons by Eric Flint both come to mind. There is also the Little Fuzzy series by H. Beam Piper.
Edit: Also, The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Honorable mention also to Dragons Egg by Robert L. Forward (humans start out more advanced in the beginning but get surpassed) and the Uplift Storm trilogy omnibus (or books 4-6) from David Brin (humans aren’t the most advanced in the entire universe but are in the planet that the stories take place on).
Children of time, kind of
well, since humans haven't mastered interstellar travel, aliens would by definition by the more advanced race were they do appear in or around earth first, and vice versa i.e. star trek when humans visit planet bound aliens first
hypothetically, I could see a rare case where a very advanced but very slow growing civilization, that has the technical capacity for interstellar travel (and indeed has far exceeded that level of technology) but for some reason simply never or rarely ever actually bothered with it, has their homeworld visited by a species that has mastered interstellar travel but only recently so. Or alternatively, a species for which interstellar travel is unusually easy, like some kind of hypothetical spaceborne organism that becomes intelligent but possesses no or only primitive technology, but can slowly move between stars without need for a ship, meeting an advanced but not yet interstellar planetary species. Some sci-fi has "space whales" or space amoebas or some other similar type of life, these would be what happens if such creatures got to whatever the rough equivalent of the stone age would be for such a thing.
Mike Resnick’s Birthright is an anthology series going through a future where humanity is the dominant species in a very filled galaxy. He has many other books that fit somewhere in the timeline, like Purgatory, Inferno and
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The "sentenced to war" series. I'm only 2 books in but the humans have like a 50 - 1 casualty rate against the aliens due to the aliens tech
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We all know humankind would annihilate any inferior species we found elsewhere in the galaxy so we could steal their planets resources (and maybe eat them).
honestly, that seems unlikely to me. uninhabited planets are abundant for resources, so we wouldnt really care about going for the very rare planet with intelligent life that poses ethical issues or some risk of fighting back, unless we were literally trying to use every scrap of matter in the galaxy which is bit more efficient and methodical than humans tend to be. Probably unlikely that theyd be biochemically similar enough to be safe to eat for that matter, beyond that most people would probably find that gross.
What I could see though is humans or some faction of humans thinking something along the lines of "they might be less advanced now, but someday they might surpass us or be a threat, so we should destroy/conquer/assimilate them while we have the advantage"
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Slight caveat, i haven't read the book yet but from what I've heard The Culture fits that description
The Forever Wars, maybe. There are aliens but they're not really the focus of the book.
We Are Legion, We Are Bob has less advanced alien races but also a more advanced race. The more advanced race doesn't show up in the first book IIRC.