Despoilers of the Golden Empire
Despoilers of the Golden Empire is a short story by science fiction writer Randall Garrett , which appeared under the pseudonym David Gordon formed from two first names in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in March 1959 .
The short story was written by Garrett as an April Fool's joke . While the story is supposed to sound like a future story about the conquest of a strange world through an expedition through the use of terms from the science fiction genre and unusual translations and paraphrases, it is only in the last line of the narrative that it becomes clear that Garrett his readers through which misdirected terms unusual for a historical story and in fact described the conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru by Francisco Pizarro .
In an epilogue , Garrett goes into the techniques of his writing, for example the powerful mineral the expedition was looking for was gold , whose power lay more in the economic than in the technological realm. Another example is the Universal Embassy ( Universal Assembly ), posing as a correct translation of Ekklesia Catholicos without so but of readers with the more common term it turns Catholic Church to be associated.