one of the all-time greats, and an annual re-read for me.
Stanistaw Lem's Fiasco. It's a depressing read but really solid, and easier than many of his other works.
The first one, Little Fuzzy, is one of my favorite books of all time. The rest are less good? but still decent? Steer clear of Scalzi's "remake" though, it's trash.
It starts off good but gets really bogged down in its own waste after a while, IMO.
Alan Dean Foster wrote a series with basically the same premise in the 90s, where evil mind control telepath aliens were waging a war against a bunch of free alien species, and the free alien species were hampered by the fact that very few aliens were capable of fighting at all, let alone effectively, but the evil telepath aliens could mind control their conquered subjects into fighting anyway. And then the losing free aliens find humans, who are basically xenomorphs crossed with hannibal lecter compared to the aliens and conveniently immune to telepathy, and they realize that humans will fight to the death for dumb shit like precious metals.
The translator is a novelist in his own right, and his Dandelion Dynasty series is quite good. It's not the translation. I suspect it's a combination of it being a hard-sf "ideas" book, and different national styles in novel writing.
Ploughed through the latest John Smith: Mediator urban fantasy, which is good enough that it would have been a solid midlist title in the 90s but since midlist doesn't exist anymore, has been banished to self-publishing.