From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

I just looked up the book Element 79 by Fred Hoyle.
It turns out the book was not a novel, but a short story collection.
Element 79 was the name of one of the stories in it, and it was about a gold-rich meteorite being found in Britain.
For some reason, I had thought it was instead a novel, and its plot went
along these lines:
Aliens invade Earth. They are vastly superior technically, and so Earth
cannot resist them.
They make only one demand: Earth must surrender every gram of gold that it possesses.
The story concerns itself with the effects of this demand on Earth
society; the loss of precious artworks, the collapse of the international monetary system, and so on.
Was a real story written along those lines which I got confused with Fred Hoyle's book which had a suitable title for it?

John Savard
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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

On Sun, 10 May 2026 19:54:59 +0000, quadi wrote:

Aliens invade Earth. They are vastly superior technically, and so Earth cannot resist them.
They make only one demand: Earth must surrender every gram of gold that
it possesses.
The story concerns itself with the effects of this demand on Earth
society; the loss of precious artworks, the collapse of the
international monetary system, and so on.

I forgot to mention: the reason for this demand was that gold was the key
to interstellar propulsion, so by stripping Earth of its gold, they were defending themselves against an eventual invasion from Earth.
So they were operating on basically the same paranoid assumption as the annihilate everybody aliens in one series of novels by David Weber.

John Savard
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