I found Paul French's Pirates of the Asteroids (1953) and figured - hey, vintage asteroid fiction, let's see how he picks up where George O Smith left off.
I don't believe I am spoiling anything when I point out that "French" is a pseudonym... for Isaac Asimov. Asimov, as of the 1950s, was (still) the authoritarian technocrat who did the Foundation series. Not for him, Belter independence. The Men Of The Asteroids are perceived as pirates, they host some actual pirates, and their secretive leader truckles to the sinister Sirius adversaries. Our hero David Starr (named for Isaac's son, of whom we'll speak no more) never questions his loyalty to the Council Of Science.
French-Asimov's sociology leads to some headscratching moments like when Starr says to the MotA's, I want to join the pirates. In Internet circles I understand they call this "fedposting". The MotA's gently inform Starr that they don't like the word. Why they don't just immediately tattoo a big "FED" sign on his buttocks and ship him back - I suppose the reader is to wait and find out.
As the science goes, we have a tension between Newtonian physics and, I'm sorry, straight-up magick. Does the plot need artificial gravity generators? Does it need FtL communication? - or are these just devices so the lazy author doesn't have to think too hard about, say, the Coriolis effects in spingrav?
I might also quibble about the nature of some of these "rocks" (as the pirates call them). French's Vesta is a fuel station; they mine beryllium on Pallas and Ceres. In our real system, differentiated subplanet Vesta is no site to scout for volatiles. In addition he got Juno in the top four by size, an early-19th-century way of thinking where a 1950s author should have known it for #13 in size. (The fourth down French's list should be Igea Borbonica, the tenth discovered.) And I don't know how Starr sees these small rocks from the cockpit; the point of that ship is to be a near-decoy which shouldn't have state-of-art telescoping (the plot revolves around its plumbing). I'd even suggest that Juno were best-employed in the conclusion, as an example of high-albedo flagging a small-sized body past its importance.
One point I'll spot for French against the review: yes, we're good at asteroidal orbit-modelling. However, in a Solar System where everyone is out mining rocks and pushing them around, in a restive Belt not keen on logging flight-plans, especially if they get magic gravity shifters: those computer maps of ours are going to be useless in a hot minute. I also noticed a mention of Mercury's twilight zone, which in 1953 meant the ribbon of a tidally-locked planet; but we can spot our author this as well since these days we're musing perma-shaded water depots on the Mercurial poles. French should be more concerned with the delta-V even to get there.
The most egregious magick is the shield which Starr has from Smith's ancient Martians allowing his ship to skate the Solar corona. Sigh.
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