Introduction

There is a particular kind of science fiction story that does something sneaky and wonderful: it pretends to be about the stars, the rockets, and the strange creatures of distant worlds, when in fact it is holding up a mirror to the reader and asking, with a perfectly straight face, “And what exactly makes you so special?” The short tale you are about to read, written in the heyday of mid-century American science fiction by the collaborative team of Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides, belongs squarely to that mischievous tradition. It wears the costume of a space adventure. It speaks the language of explorers, expeditions, and first contact. But underneath the trappings of pulp adventure, it is a sharp and gleeful satire about the oldest human folly of them all — the unshakeable, sublimely ridiculous conviction that whoever we happen to be, wherever we happen to stand, and whatever we happen to believe, we are the civilized ones, and everybody else is a primitive.

The title alone tells you most of what you need to know about the spirit of the thing. We’re Civilized! — exclamation point fully intended — is the kind of proud, defensive boast that, in the right context, becomes a punchline. Say it once and it sounds like a statement of fact. Say it twice, in the presence of the absurdities the story sets up, and it starts to sound like a man insisting on his dignity while slipping on a banana peel. Clifton and Apostolides understood that the surest way to puncture pomposity is not to argue with it but to let it strut around the stage until it trips over its own assumptions. This is comedy of the highest and most durable sort, because it is comedy that has a point.

Before you turn to the first page, it is worth taking a little time to understand the world that produced this story, the writers who crafted it, and the particular pleasures it offers the modern reader. That is what this introduction is for. It is not here to spoil the surprises — and there are surprises, the kind that work best when they arrive unannounced — but rather to set the table, to sharpen your appetite, and to make sure you come to the meal ready to taste everything the chefs have prepared.

To appreciate what Clifton and Apostolides were up to, you have to picture the moment in which they were writing. The 1950s were a golden, anxious, contradictory decade for the American imagination. The atomic bomb had ended one war and inaugurated a new and far stranger kind of fear. Rockets were no longer the stuff of comic strips; they were government programs. Within a few years, satellites would be circling the planet, and the very idea of “outer space” would shift from fantasy to front-page news. Meanwhile, on the ground, postwar prosperity was building a confident, consumer-driven, suburban America that believed in progress with an almost religious fervor. Bigger cars, brighter kitchens, taller buildings — surely this was civilization at its peak.

Science fiction of the period absorbed all of this and reflected it back in a thousand directions. The magazines that filled the newsstands — Astounding, Galaxy, If, Imagination, and dozens of others — were crammed with stories of interstellar empires, robot servants, telepathic mutants, and brave Earthmen carrying the banner of human progress to the far corners of the galaxy. A great deal of this fiction was, frankly, propaganda for human exceptionalism. Earthmen were clever, resourceful, and morally superior. Aliens were either menaces to be defeated or savages to be uplifted. The arc of the universe, these stories implied, bent toward humanity’s inevitable triumph.

But the smartest writers of the era understood that this confidence was ripe for satire. If the surrounding culture was busy congratulating itself on being the most advanced civilization in history, then the science fiction writer had a unique tool at hand: the alien encounter. By inventing a meeting between humans and some other intelligent species — or by sending humans to a planet they presumed to be “primitive” — a writer could stage a confrontation between human self-regard and an outside perspective that did not share humanity’s flattering assumptions. The results could be horrifying, as in the darker stories of the period, or they could be hilarious. Clifton and Apostolides chose hilarious, and that choice is itself a kind of wisdom. Laughter, after all, slips past our defenses in a way that lecturing never can. You can argue with a sermon. It is much harder to argue with a joke that has already made you laugh at yourself.

This was also a period when the very idea of “civilization” was being interrogated outside of fiction. Anthropology was maturing as a discipline, and educated readers were increasingly aware that the words “primitive” and “savage” said more about the people using them than about the people they described. The colonial confidence of earlier generations — the notion that there was a single ladder of progress with European-style industrial society at the top — was beginning to crack. Thoughtful people were starting to ask uncomfortable questions. By whose standard do we measure advancement? Is a culture with no skyscrapers but a rich spiritual life “behind” a culture with skyscrapers but spiritual emptiness? Who gets to do the measuring, and why do they always seem to come out on top?

Into this swirl of confidence and doubt, of rockets and reflection, Clifton and Apostolides dropped their little firecracker of a story. It takes the era’s favorite fantasy — the heroic human expedition to a less-developed world — and gives it a wicked twist, inviting the reader to laugh not at the so-called primitives but at the very people who would presume to call them that.

Mark Clifton is one of those figures from science fiction’s golden age whose work deserves more attention than it tends to get. Active primarily in the 1950s, he came to fiction relatively late in life and after an unusual career. Before he was a writer, Clifton worked for many years in industrial psychology and personnel evaluation — a job that involved studying, interviewing, and assessing thousands upon thousands of ordinary human beings. He once estimated that he had personally interviewed an astonishing number of people over the course of his career, and that experience left a deep mark on everything he wrote.

This background matters enormously, because it explains the particular flavor of Clifton’s science fiction. He was not, at heart, a writer of gadgets and spaceships, even when gadgets and spaceships appeared on the page. He was a writer about people — about how human beings think, how they deceive themselves, how they organize into institutions, and how those institutions develop their own peculiar blindnesses. He had spent his professional life watching people justify themselves, defend their prejudices, climb their little hierarchies, and rationalize their decisions. He understood from the inside how bureaucracies behave, how authority figures protect their own importance, and how the official story almost always differs from the real one. When he turned that knowledge toward fiction, the result was satire with teeth — funny, yes, but rooted in a clear-eyed and slightly weary understanding of human nature.

Clifton won acclaim in his own time. He collaborated on one of the early winners of science fiction’s most prestigious novel award, and his short fiction appeared regularly in the leading magazines. He had a knack for the kind of story that seems modest on the surface but lingers in the mind afterward, the kind that makes you chuckle in the moment and then, hours later, makes you think. His best work consistently turns on a single deflating insight: that the people in charge — the experts, the authorities, the self-appointed bearers of civilization — are very often the ones who understand the least.

Alex Apostolides, his collaborator on this and several other stories, is a more shadowy figure in the historical record, but the partnership produced a string of memorable shorter works in the early 1950s. Collaboration in science fiction can be a tricky business, but when it works, it tends to sharpen a story’s edges, because each writer can catch the other’s weaknesses and amplify the other’s strengths. The stories Clifton and Apostolides produced together have a brisk, polished, professional quality, with carefully timed reveals and a real sense of comic structure. They knew how to set up a premise, how to let it develop, and how to land the final twist with maximum impact. Reading their collaborative work, you get the sense of two craftsmen who genuinely enjoyed the game of fooling the reader in the most pleasurable possible way.

What unites all of Clifton’s work, solo and collaborative, is a deeply humane skepticism. He was skeptical of authority, skeptical of conventional wisdom, skeptical of the easy assumption that the powerful must also be the wise. But his skepticism was never cruel. He did not hate the foolish characters he wrote about; he understood them too well for that. He recognized that the impulse to feel superior is one of the most universal of human weaknesses, and that nearly all of us are guilty of it in one form or another. This generous, knowing irony is what keeps his satire from curdling into mere mockery. He invites us to laugh at his characters precisely because he is inviting us to laugh at ourselves.

That self-implicating quality is the secret ingredient of We’re Civilized! The story is not a finger-wagging exercise in which a smug author tells the reader how much smarter the author is than everyone else. It is something far more disarming. It catches us in the very act of feeling superior — it gets us nodding along with assumptions that the story will, in due course, gently and gleefully knock out from under us. The best satires are the ones in which you suddenly realize, somewhere in the middle, that the joke is partly on you. This is one of those satires.

Let me say a few words about the experience that awaits you, without giving away the particular delights that the authors have so carefully arranged. This is a short work — a piece you can read comfortably in a single sitting — and like most great short fiction, it depends on economy and surprise. Every element is in its place for a reason. The descriptions, the dialogue, the small details that might seem like mere color: keep an eye on them, because Clifton and Apostolides are not the kind of writers who waste words. In a story this compact, everything counts.

The pleasure here is largely the pleasure of perspective. The story is built around the gap between how people see themselves and how they appear from the outside — between the dignity we assume we possess and the absurdity that an impartial observer might detect. This is one of the oldest engines of comedy, and one of the most reliable. Think of every great comic moment in literature and you will find some version of this gap at its heart: the pompous man who does not know there is spinach in his teeth, the official who delivers a grand speech while standing in a puddle, the expert who confidently explains a thing he has completely misunderstood. Clifton and Apostolides take this fundamental comic mechanism and aim it at the grandest target imaginable: the concept of civilization itself, and humanity’s flattering image of its own place in the cosmos.

As you read, I would encourage you to pay attention to the word “civilized” each time it appears, and to ask yourself what it is actually doing in that sentence. Notice how slippery the word becomes the more you examine it. Is it a description of technology? Of manners? Of moral conduct? Of power? Of mere familiarity — the comfortable assurance that our way of doing things is the normal way and everyone else’s is a quaint deviation? The genius of the story is the way it pries this loaded little word apart and shows us all the unexamined assumptions hiding inside it. By the time you reach the end, you may find that you can no longer say “civilized” with quite the same easy confidence you had before. That is not an accident. That is the whole point.