Another Mystery Book...

[ZLBilley]

I read most of a series of scifi books awhile ago, and I randomly remembered them today, and wanted to take a look and see if I still liked the series and thought it worth rereading and finishing, except I can't for the life of me remember what the names of the books were called, or who the authors were, I only remember that there were two people who coauthored the books.

The general premise was that humans meet aliens in the universe, and it turns out that the humans are the most aggressive and warlike race around. Which is rather ironic, because it turns out that there is a rather massive galactic war going on between some weird octopus like aliens and their allies, which include a somewhat human race called the aan (or something) with bulging eyes want to take over the universe and everybody who doesn't like that idea--which include some ultra pacifist bird type creatures and some kind of furred bipedal creatures (which used to hold the title of most warlike before humans were found) and maybe some others. At any rate, at the beginning of the first book, the octopus dudes are planning to invade Earth, so the 'everybody else' aliens come down onto some random guy's boat, wonder what the heck the rock music is that's playing in the background, and make first contact with the human race.

After distilling some gold out of seawater for the guy, some course of events happens wherein the aliens alert Earth's leaders to the threat, nd when the bad aliens do come, all the weapons we've been blowing each other up with for years and stockpiling come in handy, and they get trounced quite thoroughly. The humans proceed to become one big pissed off happy family, since we have someone else to fight and join the war against the bad aliens.

One of the books in the series is about a group of humans were captured at birth and surgically altered to look like Aan and fight for the octopoidal aliens and how they realize this and return to their own kind.

Another follows the war from the point of view of a one of those pacifist bird thingies who's a journalist of sorts covering it.

Anyway, I think that's about all I can remember. It really bothers me that I can remember so much of the plot, and even some of the cover art, but I have no clue as to any of the book names or author names. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[Taltos]

I think what you are looking for is Alan Dean Foster "The Damned" containing 3 novels ("A Call to Arms", "The False Mirror", "The Spoils of War")