Out of the Violent Planet

From the introduction:

Here we have the older sibling of many of the settings in Realms, my hard right turn from high fantasy into psi-fi. A lot of SF posits that humans are the most _______ in the setting—the most creative, the most ruthless, the most empathetic, the most adaptable. I had the idea that we were the least something—the least psychic of all the known sentient species. From that, I branched into the idea that every other galactic culture is built on telepathy, and the conflicts arose naturally. Play Out of the Violent Planet if you want to see the sinister human conspiracies of The X-Files deal with obvious aliens that don’t quite know what to make of us.