A very small Lunarian crew in the torchship, Beynac, has confirmed Edmond Beynac's hypothesis: a large remote asteroid, chiefly iron, that was the core of a larger shattered body. The asteroid has valuable ice from a cometary impact and more iron from an impact with another fragment. Both the composition of the impactor and the matter forced up from the interior mean that there is easily mineable wealth on the surface. There is also another comet nearby. In several works, Anderson's characters find industrial wealth on uninhabitable planets.
Beynac's screens are "...full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night." (p. 338)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
This almost sounds like something Adam Smith might have written if he had cast THE WEALTH OF NATIONS as science fiction! That is, wealth is created by human beings changing the environment around them and finding USES for the resources they discover.
Sean
Sean,
Anderson brilliantly fuses physics with economics.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. More so than Heinlein did in his Future History, and VASTLY more so and more convincingly described than in Asimov's FOUNDATION books. I do think we see economics and science both being treated competently in the Co-Dominium series co-authored by Jerry Pournelle/Larry Niven (with contributions by other writers, including Anderson).
Sean
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