Anchorite

by Randall Garrett

The mountain was spinning. Not dizzily, not even rapidly, but very perceptibly, the great mass of jagged rock was turning on its axis. Captain St. Simon scowled at it. "By damn, Jules," he said, "if you can see 'em spinning, it's too damn fast!" He expected no answer, and got none. He tapped the drive pedal gently with his right foot, his gaze shifting alternately from the instrument board to the looming hulk of stone before him. As the little spacecraft moved in closer, he tapped the reverse pedal with his left foot. He was now ten meters from the surface of the asteroid. It was moving, all right. "Well, Jules," he said in his most commanding voice, "we'll see just how fast she's moving. Prepare to fire Torpedo Number One!"

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction

70 pages, Paperback

First published December 21, 2007

About the author

Randall Garrett's full name was Gordon Randall Phillip David Garrett. For more information about him see https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?239

He was married to Vicki Ann Heydron

His pseudonyms include: Gordon Randall Garrett, Gordon Aghill, Grandal Barretton, Alexander Blade, Ralph Burke, Gordon Garrett, David Gordon, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgenson, Darrel T. Langart, Blake MacKenzie, Jonathan Blake MacKenzie, Seaton Mckettrig, Clyde (T.) Mitchell, Mark Phillips (with Laurence Janifer), Robert Randall, Leonard G. Spencer, S.M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance.

Reviews

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this a lot. It started out thoroughly describing how to anchor an asteroid for later towing and processing. It felt like The Martian in that it seems quite likely this is how it would be done.
After reading the first few pages, I got the feeling that The Expanse series was a heavily inspired by this book.
Like many other books from around 1960, the book is more about different societies than awesome high-tech gear. It was a refreshing, but short, read.

[Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting this to be about some exotic substance called anchorite, but it's actually a frontier-men-are-manlier-style story; not surprising since it was published in Analog.

[Alex W · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like spending three hours getting prattled at by eugenicists.

[Janelle]

Dnf. The Librivox narrator is normally excellent but this time some of the character voicing was annoying. I guess he was just following the text, so maybe I should blame the author rather than the narrator.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Routine 1950s science fiction with a heavy libertarian propaganda element. Funnily enough the technique for asteroid mining may well be very accurate.

[Kyle Dougherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn't sure where this story was going at first, but I liked the socio-political topics discussed throughout.

[Katia M. Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting vision of the future. I liked the way in which society was portrayed and the various philosophies. I did find the writing style extremely dry and boring though. Maybe this is the nature of these types of books as I've found quite a few older dystopian sci-fi novels/stories are simply great swathes of description and explanation of the world. Which is fine if you get super excited about world building, but if you actually want something to happen, then it is tedious.