Relic

The author seems to have a gift for presenting unique alien cultures without relying on the over-done trope of being relentlessly antagonistic and/or evil. Foster's aliens are non-humanoid, but truly civilized races, and part of the fun of this book was seeing how they related to others but also to the universe which has recently become nearly devoid of humanity. And therein lies the focal point of most of the book: when a single human is discovered wandering on one of the many depopulated human colony worlds, the aliens that discover him must try to find out two things: (1) Why he did not perish along with the rest of humanity? (2) Is what brought about the downfall of humans still active in the galaxy? A fun read!