first I’ll suggest a couple that fit what i mean:
Speaker for the Dead- OSC
The sparrow and children of God by mary doria russell
Semiosis and Interference by Sue Burke
children of time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler
and some books that are NOT it:
I’ve read a few of the first contact series by Peter Cawdron but these books focus on initial contact and don’t seem to dig deep into the alien cultures.
by FaithlessnessBest845
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I apologize for the formatting error! That should have been a List, not a run on paragraoh!
The Foreigner series or the Chanur series by CJ Cherryh are both all about this – Foreigner is largely from the perspective of the lone human diplomat to an alien society navigating the cultural divide and Chanur is from the perspective of a lioness alien ship captain as she navigates a multispecies interstellar cultural rift. Chanur does have some space battles but I’d say most of it is focused on how they can avoid actual violence in trying to understand each other.
Definitely Ursula K Le Guin’s [The Left Hand of Darkness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18423.The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness), it is exactly this.
Maybe Whipping Star by Frank Herbert? It features an alien legal system and a few other things that I enjoyed.
The Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, starting with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.
From memory books 2 and 3 are focused more on humans (though in my opinion, 2 is the highlight of the series) but 1 has a healthy sized alien cast and 4 has no humans in sight.
I second the recommendations of Ursuka L. Le Guin and C. J. Cherryh. I also recommend:
* Provenance by Ann Leckie. It sounds like Translation State by Ann Leckie is also this, but I haven’t read it yet. These two books are stand alones set in the same universe as her Ancillary Justice trilogy, but though the trilogy has aliens, they are shrouded in mystery.
* Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
* The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
* The [Trade Pact trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/series/41579-trade-pact-universe) by Julie E. Czerneda. Starts with A Thousand Words for Stranger. That was her debut novel so the worldbuilding is pretty rudimentary in the first book, but after that she gets into amazing detail about all the different alien species. This author is a biologist, and takes a lot of inspiration from real world biology. There’s also a prequel trilogy, Stratification, that shows the distant history of the central alien species, but to be honest I have not been enjoying the Stratification books.
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Books that are *not* about aliens, they are about vastly different human societies. I would also put The Left Hand of Darkness in this category:
* Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury. Incredibly rich worldbuilding.
* Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
* The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks