Do Unto Others

Happy Graves knows exactly what kind of woman his Aunt Mattie is: the kind who collects planets the way other people collect stamps, who speaks exclusively in clichés, and who has never met a civilization she couldn't improve. When she assembles the Daughters of Terra for a mission to Capella IV, Happy tags along as the family cross to bear. Their objective: save the octopus-like natives from themselves, because obviously beings living on a world of salt have never heard of bathing. The Golden Rule has never met a more certain application. What Clifton understood in 1956, and what makes this novella still sting seventy years later, is the particular violence of kindness. Aunt Mattie means well. She always means well. That's what makes her so dangerous. The comedy unfolds with quiet horror as the Daughters of Terra impose their values on creatures whose entire existence is alien to their assumptions, until the natives do the only logical thing: they return the favor in salt. It's a masterpiece of satirical SF, using the distance of another world to hold a mirror up to American moral imperialism and asking the question we're still not done asking: what if "doing unto others" is just colonialism with better PR?