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Asteroids are a common theme in fiction, especially in science fiction.

A common depiction of asteroids (and less often, of Comets) in fiction is as a threat, whose impact on Earth could result with incalculable damage and loss of life. This has a basis in scientific hypotheses regarding such impacts in the distant past as responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other past catastrophes —though, as they seem to occur within tens of millions of years of each other, there is no special reason (other than creating a dramatic story line) to expect a new such impact at any close millennium.

• An episode of the political television drama, The West Wing entitled "Impact Winter" included a subplot in which the White House staff prepared for a possible asteroid strike on the Earth. (First broadcast on December 15, 2004).
• An episode of Stargate SG-1 entitled "Fail Safe" has a Goa'uld surreptitiously diverting an asteroid onto a collision course with Earth (first broadcast April 5, 2002).
• The disaster movie Meteor (1979) depicts an asteroid named Orpheus hurtling toward Earth after its orbit is deflected by a comet.
• Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Hammer of God (1993) depicts mankind's efforts to stop an asteroid named Kali from hitting the Earth. The film Deep Impact (1998) was based on Clarke's novel, although in the movie, the asteroid becomes a comet. In another Clarke book, Rendezvous with Rama, an asteroid impacts in the Adriatic and causes the destruction of Venice. In the aftermath of that disaster, a regular space service guarding against rogue asteroids is formed, whose members are the protagonists in the main story line —a meeting with a mysterious alien space artifact.
• In the LucasArts game The Dig (originally released in 1995) and its novelization, the impact-threatening asteroid Attila turns out to be an alien probe.
• In the 1998 movie Starship Troopers, based on Robert Heinlein's controversial 1959 book of the same name, aliens launch an asteroid at Earth, completely wiping out Buenos Aires. This is the opening move in the war.
• Similarly, in Jerry Pournelle's and Larry Niven's book Footfall (1985), elephant-like aliens launch an asteroid which lands in the Indian Ocean, causing huge tidal waves which almost completely wipe out life in India and cause enormous damage to all countries which have shores on that ocean.
• In another Pournelle book, Lucifer's Hammer (1977), the world's population falls into panic at hearing of an impending collision with a space object, is falsely reassured when hearing that the object is not an asteroid but a comet "with the density of sundae", then finds out the hard way that at the speed of collision this still causes enormous damage and throws the world into total chaos.
• The film Armageddon (1998) is also about efforts to stop an asteroid hitting Earth. Its representation of an asteroid (and of space travel in general) is deeply unrealistic.
• In Larry Niven's book Protector (1973), Jack Brennan —a human turned into a Pak Protector— commits genocide by causing an ice asteroid to collide with Mars, thereby causing a rise in the water content of its atmosphere and exterminating the native Martians to whom water is a deadly poison.
• The Oxygen Barons (1990) by Gregory Feeley begins with the protagonist Galvanix, a citizen of the Lunar Republic, preparing to plant a small fusion bomb on an asteroid which threatens to smash into the terraformed moon, causing untold devastation. He succeeds, but there are complications which take a whole book to resolve. (See http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/Otherrealms/OR.28.)
• In Green Slime (1968), a masterpiece of B-movies, a rogue asteroid hurtles toward Earth. The astronauts leave Space station Gamma 3 and place bombs on the asteroid, finding it inhabited by strange blobs of glowing slime that are drawn to the equipment. Unfortunately for everyone some of the slime is carried back on a space suit and soon evolves into tentacled creatures! See the review: . The movie inspired the classic board game Awful Green Things from Outer Space.

Another way in which asteroids could be considered a source of danger is by depicting them as a hazard to navigation, especially threatening to ships travelling from Earth to the outer parts of the Solar System and thus needing to pass the Asteroid Belt (or make a time- and fuel-consuming detour around it). Asteroids in this context provide to space travel stories a space equivalent of reefs and underwater rocks in the older genre of sea-faring adventures stories. And like reefs and rocks in the ocean, asteroids as navigation hazards can also be used by bold outlaws to avoid pursuit. Representations of the Asteroid Belt in film tend to make it unrealistically cluttered with dangerous rocks. In reality asteroids, even in the main belt, are spaced extremely far apart (even so, they can still be a risk to ships travelling at high speeds).

• Atari released the arcade game Asteroids in 1979.
• In the classic science-fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the Discovery has a scientifically accurate "close approach" by a binary asteroid whilst en route to Jupiter. The scene simply cuts briefly to two lone rocks passing by the ship, with tens of thousands of kilometres to spare.
• Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2061: Odyssey Three (1986) depicts a journey through the asteroid belt and its ominous parallels with the journey of the RMS Titanic.
• In the BBC drama documentary Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets (2004), the Pegasus encounters a binary asteroid from much closer than expected, and dubs the rocks "Hubris" and "Catastrophe" as a result.
• In Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953), as its name suggests, the Asteroid Belt is the haunt of dangerous pirates. The hero, an agent of the The Terran Empire, has not only his job but also a private score to settle with pirates who had killed had his parents. In the end, however, the enlightened Empire gives former Pirate strongholds in terraformed asteroids a chance to stay on as law-abiding communities. (See http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/Asimov/Books/Book010.html.)
• A somewhat similar theme, but with reversed sympathies, figures in the film The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Han Solo enters an asteroid field to flee from the fleet of the evil Empire (Star Wars), and C-3PO thinks it is a bad idea. Han then hides his ship, the Millennium Falcon inside a giant asteroid; the ship is then attacked by a vast monster that lives within the asteroid.

Before colonization of the asteroids became an attractive possibility, a main interest in them was theories as to their origin.

• In Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet (1948), the hero's first assignment after graduation from the Space Patrol's academy is to a ship charting the intractable Asteroid Belt. He has the luck to be involved in a startling discovery: not only is the Belt proven to be what is left of of an exploded planet, but also remains are found of that planet's inhabitants.
• Similarly, the Japanese science fiction film The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957) reveals the solar system's asteroid belt as the remnants of the Mysterian's home planet, Mysteroid, after a nuclear war broke out.
• In James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), first book of the Gentle Giants series, Minerva was a planet that exploded to form the asteroid belt 50,000 years ago.
• In Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time (1965), two groups —"The Wardens" and "The Rangers"— wage a relentless struggle for control of Earth and the Solar System. As a result, Mars is blown up, its remnants becoming a new Asteroid Belt. Thereupon, the two fighting sides tacitly agree to use more subtle forms of fighting, involving mainly time-travel.
• In Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium (1962), the hero, travelling in a vehicle capable of traversing parallel worlds passes many where Earth had been shattered in a cataclysmic war and was rendered into a scattered collection of asteroids. He gets a brief and horrifying glimpse of an asteroid on which a section of road is still visible. Later, he learns that our own Earth narrowly avoided a similar fate.
• L. Neil Smith's book The Venus Belt (1980) ends with the "useless" planet Venus being deliberately blown up so as to create a new Asteroid Belt. (This in fact belongs to a later kind of asteroid SF, where asteroids are rated as more valuable than planets).
• In Fredric Brown's Rogue in Space (1957), a living (and intelligent, and very powerful) asteroid arrives in the Solar System's Asteroid Belt, after countless aeons of wandering interstellar space. Passing near a lonely asteroid, "he" encounters the first living beings other than "himself" which "he" ever met: a likeable criminal involved in a life-and-death struggle with a corrupt and power-mad judge. The bad judge is eventually killed, but so is the judge's beautiful wife who is is the good criminal's ally and beloved. The god-like Living Rock takes pity on the couple, resurrects the woman, collects all the asteroids in the Belt and forms them back into a planet with "himself" at its centre, and makes of the new planet a private Paradise for "his" favourite human couple.

When the theme of interplanetary colonization first entered SF, the Asteroid Belt was quite low on the list of desirable real estate, far behind such planets as Mars and Venus (often conceived as a a kind of paradise planet, until probes in the 1960s revealed the appalling temperatures and conditions under its clouds). Thus, in many stories and books the Asteroid Belt, if not a positive hazard, is still a rarely-visited backwater in a colonized Solar System.

• Marooned Off Vesta (1939), Isaac Asimov's first published story, concerns the plight of a group of astronauts stranded in orbit around the asteroid 4 Vesta. A later short story, 'Catch that Rabbit', has a lonely asteroid as the location for an intractable robot mystery and tangle. (In 1950 collected in repeatedly republished I, Robot).
• In John Wyndham's short story Dumb Martian (1952), a ruthless Earthman buys a young Martian woman (Martians, in this story, being a humanoid race subject to Earth-human colonialism and exploitation). She is to serve as a companion in his five-year of lonely tour of duty on an asteroid orbiting Jupiter. The power struggle between the two of them, isolated on the asteroid, forms the main plot, and the arrogant and chauvinistic Earthman finds the hard way that his "Dumb Martian" is not as dumb as he thought her.
• In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985), and his later companion piece Ender's Shadow, the Asteroid Belt is mainly a military zone, housing the bases and institutions dedicated to the war against Earth's insectoid invaders (which in the end turn out not quite as horrible as official propaganda made them look). A major part of both books takes place at Battle School on 433 Eros where gifted children are kept in complete isolation and ruthlessly turned into tough fleet commanders, losing their childhood in the process.

The prospects of colonizing the Solar System planets became more dim with increasing discoveries about conditions on them. Conversely, the potential value of the asteroids increased, as a vast accumulation of mineral wealth, accessible in conditions of minimal gravity, and supplementing Earth's dwindling resources. Stories of asteroid mining became more and more numerous since the late 1940s, with the next logical step being depictions of a society on terraformed asteroids —in some cases dug under the surface, in others having dome colonies and in still others provided with an atmosphere which is kept in place by an artificial gravity. An image developed and was carried from writer to writer, of "Belters" or "Rock Rats" as rugged and independent-minded individuals, resentful of all Authority (in some books and stories of the military and political power of Earth-bound nation states, in others of the corporate power of huge companies). As such, this sub-genre proved naturally attractive to writers with Libertarian tendencies. Moreover, depictions of the Asteroid Belt as The New Frontier clearly draw (sometimes explicitly) on the considerable literature of the Nineteenth-Century Frontier and the Wild West. And since (in nearly all stories) the asteroids are completely lifeless until the arrival of the humans, it is a New Frontier completely free of the moral taint of the brutal dispossession of the Native Americans in the original.

• An early example are Seetee Ship (1949) and Seetee Shock (1950) by Jack Williamson. Earth, Mars, Venus and the Jovian Moons are all dominated by competing tyrannical political systems (a Communist one, a Fascist one, and a Capitalist "democracy" totally dominated by a single vast, all-owning and all-controlling corporation. The scattered, despised and numerically-inferior asteroid miners are left as the sole remaining champions of Individual Liberty. The "Rock Rats" neatly turn the tables by finding out how to produce energy from the collision of matter and anti-matter asteroids (anti-matter or "Contraterrene" is the "Seetee" (C-T) of the title). Virtually unlimited energy is broadcast from the Asteroid Belt all over the Solar System, for everybody to tap and use completely free of charge —and all the oppressive systems go crashing down.
• An unfavorable review of one of his books, which compared the writing to that of a comic strip, brought Williamson to the attention of The New York Sunday News, which needed a science fiction writer for a new comic strip. Williamson wrote the strip "Beyond Mars", loosely based on his novel Seetee Ship for several years until the paper dropped all comics.
• At the center of Poul Anderson's story The Rogue (1963) is a tense love affair between an asterite entrepreneur, who represents a kind of reversion to 19th Century Capitalism, and a woman officer in a space warship sent by the Social Justice Party (in power at Washinton D.C) to clip that entrepreneur's wings. The encounter is the first skirmish in what eventually develops into a full-scale Asterite War of Independence (consciously modelled on the American one), told of in further stories. Anderson's asteroid stories were eventually collected in Tales of the Flying Mountains, where the flourishing Asteroid Republic makes of a terraformed asteroid the first intersettellar ship, which in the course of generations would reach other stellar systems. The veterans who go along tell, for the edification of the young generation, their memoirs of the pioneering days.
• In Norman Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle (1967), the Asteroid Belt is originally colonized by Afrikaners who hog its mineral wealth and lord it over later-arrived immigrants from Third World countries —in effect recreating Apartheid all over again. A revolution culminates with the creation of the Belt Free State, a republic far less stable than Anderson's which is headed by the likeable though thoroughly corrupt Bart Faden. The intervention of the Big Powers from Earth, seeking to control the same mineral wealth, leads to Fraden's overthrow and his escape out of the Solar System —setting the stage to further (quite grisly) adventures which are the book's main plotline.
• In Larry Niven's Known Space, the Solar System is divided between the UN-dominated Earth and the Asteroid Belt, two competing political and cultural entities whose rivalry might at any moment descend into a destructive war —forming the background to several books and the main theme of The World of Ptavvs. In this universe, it planets such as Mars which are the neglected backwaters, Belters spurning them and their gravity wells as fit only for "Flatlanders".
• L. Neil Smith, a committed Libertarian who makes no secret of using his books as a platform to promote his ideology, returns again and again to the Asteroids. His novel Pallas (Tor Books, 1993) depicts a modernized hunting-based life on the terraformed asteroid Pallas and introduces Emerson Ngu. The book was partly inspired by the 1987 article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" written by Jared Diamond. The book also includes a brief description of a way to encapsulate the entire surface of a small body such as an asteroid to enable creating an Earthlike environment. The asteroids and the unique culture developing on and in them also figure prominently in Smith's North American Confederation alternate history series, with its social system of total Free Enterprise - among them the aforementioned The Venus Belt. (See http://www.reference.com/browse/L._Neil_Smith.)
• In The Stone Dogs (1990), part of S. M. Stirling's dystopian Draka alternate history series, the Asteroid Belt becomes a major arena of the decades-long struggle between "The Domination of the Draka", a political and military entity bent on conquering everybody else and reducing them to literal slavery, and its arch-enemy "The Alliance for Democracy". (SPOILER FOLLOWS!) Following "The Final War" of that history's 1998, the tough Asteroid miners are the last holdout against the victorious Draka. Though they, too, are eventually overwhelmed, they are able to launch "New America", a huge sraship carrying some 40,000 colonists to the stars, to keep the cause alive and fight again another day.
• In Jerry Pournelle's story Tinker (1975), part of the collection High Justice which is the first volume of Pournelle's Future History, the Asteroid Belt is dominated by a consortium of multinational corporations (upgraded to multiplanetary corporations by this time). Pournelle deliberately turns upside down the well-established rules of this sub-genre by making the corporations and their field agent into the Good Guys of the story. The Bad Guys are the rugged miners of Jefferson Asteroid, who use assorted dirty tricks in their effort to get free of the corporations' rule —an aspiration which a character describes as "an atavistic nationalism for which there is no room in the Belt".
• The latest addition to the genre seems to be Ben Bova's ambitious novel series The Asteroid Wars (2001–2004) which focuses on a trade war over the mining of the Belt which develops into a shooting war.
• James Hlavaty's and Tom Lehmann's 1995 game 2038; Tycoons of the Asteroid Belt transposes the highly successfull "18xx" series of railroad games into the asteroid belt.

• Asteroids