"Externus Incognita" by Ty Karnitz

Though they are very different in themselves, the way I feel about this story is similar to the way I feel about the Buckley story I wrote about recently. The primary Bad Ideology here — as you might guess from the title — is the intellectual legacy of imperialism more than misogyny specifically (which Karnitz, um, "avoids" by largely pretending women don't exist), and as far as I know Karnitz isn't running around trying to teach gigantic inhuman domination-machines to Dream Big With Technology (which gives him a big leg up over Buckley in any "being a decent human being" competition), but in similar fashion this story, refreshingly, has no interest in being smooth and reasonable — opting instead, as the living gold rains down from the god-comet, for the unhinged disjunctures that are such a large part of what draws me to sf in the first place.