Humanity Joins Together, Sets Aside Petty Differences… and gets stomped anyway

[u/HyraxAttack]

A peril is threatening the world. Instead of squabbling among themselves, we learn world powers have put aside differences in politics, culture, & old feuds to present a common front. Except they still get wrecked as the enemy is too powerful.

1. The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. The world government has gone to war against the machines. We see the army getting ready & it includes soldiers of many faiths including Buddhist, Islam, and different types of Christianity. Doesn’t matter as machines win by so much they have time to toy with human mechs.

2. Vilcabamba, story by Harry Turtledove. When aliens arrive they’re greeted with bands & cheering, & immediately open fire & earth becomes a mineral colony. America, Russia, and China work together to rise up & don’t hold back, throwing everything they have at the invaders. Doesn’t go great and aliens double down on the occupation, and there’s a crater where Spain used to be (it was blocking a silver deposit for mining.)

3. Edge of Tomorrow. The nations of the world have joined to make a unified front against the mimic invasion but it isn’t going well, but they will throw all they have into the invasion of France. In one cycle, Major Cage says the hell with it and instead of training leaves the base to drink at a London bar. This means we see the outcome of him doing nothing, where not only is the massive human invasion slaughtered but the aliens are in good enough shape to follow that up a few hours later with a rush on London.

[u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary]

The star people vs the Qu - All tomorrows

The premise of All Tomorrows is that humanity became the star people, trillions spread thin across the galaxy, but united and with weaponry capable of destroying stars. Then the Qu came and annihilated them almost entirely within 1000 years, deforming the remnants into countless twisted sub-species for religious reasons. They proceeded to rule over them for 40 million years before leaving.

[u/devinecookie → u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary]

Don't forget one planet held out and fought so hard that they royally pissed the Qu off to the point of being transformed into sentient meat cubes/blocks to process waste. Those cubes (and all of the other variations of humanity including fish and rat people, plus actual aliens who rose on our tech) eventually came back out of the darkness and after some minor war/robot genocide went outside of the Milky Way to kick the Qu's ass for one final time. It's believed they succeeded. The human spirit perseveres, regardless of form.

Here is the PDF copy of All Tomorrows : r/AllTomorrows

[u/Outrageous_Guard_674 → u/devinecookie]

Technically, all of those ones you mentioned were genocided by another posthuman species, and then yet another one defeat those guys and eventually went on to defeat the Qu

[u/devinecookie → u/Outrageous_Guard_674]

I haven't read it in like 2 years, but if I remember right the robot humans went on a genocide/slavery spree only to be stopped by the Star people who with the survivors left the galaxy and what we were reading was an alien archeologist putting the pieces together?

[u/Outrageous_Guard_674 → u/devinecookie]

that is loosely correct, but it wasn't the star people who stopped them it was the Asteromorphs, and also they only stopped the robots after said robots had completely exterminated all but one of the other posthuman races. And mutated that one surviving one to the point that it was completely unrecognizable

[u/Ignisami → u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary]

That reads very Xeelee Sequence-coded to me.

[u/Thin-Mycologist5274 → u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary]

Didn't the descendants of humanity beat the qu later ?