Scifi anthology - Contains terraforming robots story

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I took a Science Fiction class in college a few years ago (2005 or 2006) and one of the stories we read in a collection really struck me and I don't know how to track it down. The professor who taught the class isn't able to locate the syllabus and can't recall the specific book

The story that caught my attention was about a mammalian species that recently had to destroy some "terraforming robots" that were making their worlds "safe for habitation" but there was a plot twist that the "aliens" who sent the terraforming robots were actually humans who had modified themselves to become disgusting, vapid beasts.

The species in the story that was in the process of being colonized ends up voting for a politician to go to war against humanity instead of turning over the locations of their other colonies, but the previous leader comes back to Earth with the "human" who was sent to negotiate after the negotiations fail, resigned to the fate of her species.