Asteroids in fiction

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest and first discovered planetoid of the main-belt asteroids.

After Ceres, Asteroid 433 Eros is perhaps the most-commonly mentioned asteroid, probably because it is one of the largest near-Earth asteroids.

• “Our Distant Cousins” (1929), short story by Lord Dunsany. An enterprising aviator flies to Mars, but ends up on Eros on his return trip due to a navigation error. Everything on Eros is tiny due to its small size and gravity; the aviator brings a tiny elephant back to Earth in a matchbox, but it escapes.[9]
• "On the Planetoid Eros" (1931), a storyline in the Buck Rogers comic strip.
• Dig Allen Space Explorer (1959–62), series of juvenile novels by Joseph Greene. Eros turns out to be a disguised alien spaceship.
• Men into Space (1960), TV tie-in novel by Murray Leinster. The First Martian Expedition, commanded by Col. Ed McCauley, lands on Eros to refuel en route to Mars.
• Space Angel (1962–64), Cambria Productions TV series. In the episode "The Visitor from Outer Space", Scott McCloud and his crew are forced to destroy Eros by deflecting it into the Sun, when it becomes a hazard to spaceship navigation.
• Captive Universe (1969), novel by Harry Harrison. Eros has been converted into a vast hollow generation ship, the interior of which provides the setting for the story.
• "Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)" (1971), a short satirical story by Stanisław Lem, published usually within The Star Diaries collection. A letter purportedly written by Ijon Tichy criticizing widespread vandalism done by space tourists describes Eros as one of the most vandalized asteroids, being strewn with graffiti, such as initials of loving couples, petty poetry, hearts pierced by arrows etc.
• Ender's Game (1985), novel by Orson Scott Card. Eros was formerly an outpost for the aliens known as Formics who installed artificial gravity, but was taken over by humans; a Command School was built there. This is where Ender was sent after he graduated from Battle School.
• Vacuum Flowers (1987), a novel by Michael Swanwick, is set partly in "Eros Kluster", a slum of jerry-rigged space stations orbiting 433 Eros.
• Asteroid (1997), NBC's two-part miniseries features a series of asteroids heading towards Earth. Eros, the larger of the two asteroids, is shattered into small fragments by the Air Force's ABL in an attempt to divert it from a certain impact on Earth. Eros still proceeds to rain over Dallas, Texas.
• Justice League of America #26 (February 1999) by DC Comics. The JLA uses Eros as an inescapable prison for their unkillable foe, The General. He is simply deposited on the asteroid's flatter end. He later escapes with the aid of alien forces.
• Evolution (2003), novel by Stephen Baxter. Eros plays an important role in the future evolution of life on Earth. Millions of years after being perturbed into a new orbit, the asteroid collides with Earth, bringing about a mass extinction. The micrometeoroid-ravaged shell of NEAR Shoemaker still stands on the surface of Eros until seconds before the impact.
• Leviathan Wakes (2011), first novel of book series by James S. A. Corey. Supporting "a population of one and a half million", Eros is "a port of call in the first generation of humanity's expansion" into the outer solar system and is the setting for a large part of this science fiction series opener.
• The Expanse (2015– ), TV series (SyFy network, 2015–2018; Prime Video since 2019) adapted from Leviathan Wakes (above) and its sequels.

Asteroid 1566 Icarus, best known for its close approach to Earth and the Sun, has been the subject of multiple fictional works, such as:

• "Nebo Zovyot" ("The Sky Beckons", 1959), a Soviet science-fiction film, depicts an emergency landing and cosmonauts walking on Icarus as it passes Mars.
• "Summertime on Icarus" (aka "Icarus Ascending", 1960), short story by Arthur C. Clarke. An astronaut is stranded on Icarus as it approaches perihelion.
• Alley Oop, newspaper comic strip. During Icarus' 1968 passage the character Doc Wonmug electrostatically deflects it away from a collision with Earth.
• Icarus's Way (a.k.a. The Trip of Icarus) (1974), novel by Lyuben Dilov. Icarus is equipped with engines and turned into a large spaceship travelling for generations through the Universe.[10]
• In the Ocean of Night (1977), novel by Gregory Benford. An asteroid named Icarus plays a major role.
• Lucifer's Hammer (1977), novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The 1968 passing of Icarus is mentioned several times. However, the actual impactor is a comet, perturbed by a passage of the hypothetical dwarf star Nemesis.
• The Memory of Whiteness (1985), novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Icarus is inhabited by a religious cult that worships its close approaches to the Sun.

Asteroid 3 Juno is one of the largest belt asteroids, the second-most-massive stony S-type.

• Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), a Real Robot anime directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino. The asteroid Juno, renamed Luna 2, has been placed into Lunar orbit, opposite the moon for the purpose of supplying materials for space colony construction. It is later retrofitted into a military base for the Earth Federation.
• Eon (1985), science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Juno appears as a hollowed out asteroid/starship from the future, called the Thistledown.
• The title character of the song "The Lean Green Vegetable Fiend (From 'Tuther Side Of The Moon)" by Nervous Norvus hails "from Juno, on the other side of the moon-o".
• In the Sailor Moon metaseries (1995), a subset of villains called the "Amazoness Quartet" appear in the fourth arc of the manga and its anime counterpart, Sailor Moon SuperS. One of them is called JunJun who is later revealed to be a Sailor Senshi named Sailor Juno.

Asteroid 2 Pallas is the third-largest belt asteroid.

• "Palladian Space Pirates" (1936), a storyline in the Buck Rogers comic strip.
• Seetee Shock (1949) and Seetee Ship (1951), novels by Jack Williamson in which many smaller asteroids are made of "contraterrene" or "seetee" matter, an early fictional name for antimatter. Pallas is made of normal matter and is the seat of government for the "Mandate" which oppressively governs the Asteroid Belt.
• Pallas (1993), book 1 in L. Neil Smith's science fiction-fantasy series, Ngu Family Saga. Emerson Ngu, a boy who lives in a dystopian socialist commune in a crater on the terraformed asteroid Pallas, creates a crystal radio and is astonished to learn of the world outside the commune. Escaping, he discovers that the rest of Pallas is a libertarian utopia. Unable to forget his semi-enslaved family—whose "workers' paradise" is starving to death—he innovates a cheap but durable gun (because the Libertarians on Pallas, to their shame, did not have a domestic firearms industry), and sets about liberating his former commune. The book was partly inspired by Jared Diamond's article, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" (1987). 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 the creation of an Earth-like environment.
• Captain Future magazine, Winter 1942 ("Quest Beyond the Stars"), featured a version of Pallas known as the "Pirates' Planet".
• "The Shrinking Spaceman", episode of Space Patrol (1962), puppet television series. When the Galasphere crew are sent to repair the sonar beam transmitter on the asteroid Pallas, Husky succumbs to a mysterious shrinking disease after cutting his hand on a rock. Keeping him in suspended animation Professor Heggerty attempts to find a cure.
• In the Sailor Moon metaseries (1995), a subset of villains called the "Amazoness Quartet" appear in the fourth arc of the manga and its anime counterpart, Sailor Moon SuperS. One of them is called PallaPalla, who is later revealed to be a Sailor Senshi named Sailor Pallas.
• In the 2014 RPG/FPS video game Destiny, Pallas was target of the Fallen House of Wolves' largest fleet in an extremely long time, besieging the asteroid.
• In book 1, Leviathan Wakes of the novel series The Expanse, Pallas was a Belt station where the Rocinante had allegedly taken off.

Asteroid 4 Vesta is the second largest of the asteroids.

• "Marooned Off Vesta" (1939), short story by Isaac Asimov. The surviving passengers of a wrecked spaceship are stranded in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. This was Asimov's first published work.
• Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958), a novel by Isaac Asimov. Vesta is the site of an interstellar peace conference.
• Known Space series (1964 onward) by Larry Niven. Vesta is the site of one of the larger bases in the belt. It is a media center for the belt, and home of the Vesta Beam.
• In the Sailor Moon metaseries (1995), a subset of villains called the "Amazoness Quartet" appear in the fourth arc of the manga and its anime counterpart, Sailor Moon SuperS. One of them is called VesVes who is later revealed to be a Sailor Senshi named Sailor Vesta.
• Portions of Christopher L. Bennett's novel Only Superhuman (2012) take place on asteroid habitats in orbit of Vesta.
• Vesta is the setting of Felix R. Savage's novel The Vesta Conspiracy (2015), which takes place in 2287.
• "Armageddon Off Vesta" (1989), novel by M S Murdock. Book three of the Buck Rogers Martian Mars Trilogy based on the TSR Buck Rogers board game. Venusian warriors aid Buck in his desperate efforts to save Earth from the formidable powers of RAM's space fleet.

• Explorers on the Moon (1952), comic in The Adventures of Tintin series by Hergé. As Tintin and his friends are en route to the moon, 2101 Adonis unexpectedly comes perilously close to the spacecraft. During a spacewalk, Captain Haddock inadvertently goes into orbit around the asteroid and has to be rescued.
• Space Apprentice (1962), novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A scientific station on 15 Eunomia is annihilating large fragments of the asteroid in its advanced experiments, including investigation of gravitational waves, and a mine on 324 Bamberga produces "space pearls".
• 15 Eunomia is mentioned in the science-fiction novel Rendezvous With Rama (1973), by Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the five largest asteroids.
• "Sketches Among The Ruins of My Mind" (1973), short story by Philip José Farmer. The asteroid 1685 Toro is diverted to destroy an alien probe.
• "The Fubar Suit" (1997), short story by Stephen Baxter. An astronaut explores 624 Hektor. Sample from 'The Baxterium' website.
• Manifold: Time (1999), novel by Stephen Baxter. 3753 Cruithne. Humans send a pregnant genetically enhanced squid to operate equipment on the asteroid. The intelligent squids descended from the original colonist exploit Cruithne's mineral resources.
• Dead Hand (2001), novel by Harold Coyle. The asteroid Nereus 1991 HWC impacts Siberia triggering a desperate struggle to prevent a renegade Russian general from using the Perimetr system to overthrow the Russian government.[11]
• Meteor (2009), a miniseries featuring a comet impact sending 114 Kassandra on a collision course with the Earth. The impact splits the asteroid into halves, one of which is destroyed and the second of which is deflected as it enters the Earth's atmosphere.
• Seveneves (2015), a novel by Neal Stephenson, includes the capture and movement of 113 Amalthea into Earth orbit, where it acts as a protective shield for the International Space Station.
• "Slingshot" (2015), the 9th episode of the first season of Thunderbirds Are Go, takes place on 21 Lutetia.
• The term "asteroid" is defined in the Martha Speaks episode "Dogs in Space/Dogs from Space".

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 scenario is based on such past events as the impact event responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Such events are, however, sufficiently rare that there is no special reason to expect such an impact in the near future.

• The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters, an 1835 novel by Vladimir Odoevsky, is set in 4338, a year before Biela's Comet was to collide with the Earth as computed in the 1820s; although in reality the comet burned up later in the nineteenth century.
• "The Wandering Asteroid", episode of Space Patrol (1962), puppet television series. The Space Patrol crew accept a dangerous mission to destroy an asteroid deflected from its orbit by a cometary collision and heading directly for the Martian capital Wotan.
• The Green Slime (1968), film. 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. The movie inspired the classic board game The Awful Green Things from Outer Space.
• Rendezvous with Rama (1972), novel by Arthur C. Clarke. An asteroid impacts in Northern Italy destroys Padua, Verona and Venice. In the aftermath of that disaster, a regular Spaceguard against rogue asteroids is formed, whose members are the protagonists in the main story line — a meeting with a mysterious alien space artifact.
• Lucifer's Hammer (1977), novel by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Earth'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 Hermes Fall (1978), novel by John Baxter. NASA discovers the asteroid Hermes is on a collision course with Earth and initiates a desperate attempt to deflect it.[12]
• Meteor (1979), film. The asteroid Orpheus hurtles toward Earth after its orbit is deflected by a comet. The movie was inspired in part by a M.I.T. student report. Project Icarus (1968).
• Impact! (1979), novel by R. V. Fodor & G. J. Taylor. A series of asteroid collisions trigger World War III.[13]
• Shiva Descending (1980), novel by Gregory Benford and William Rotsler,[14][15]
• Thor's Hammer (1983), novel by Wynne Whiteford. An attempt by an unbalanced fanatic stationed in the asteroid belt to destroy Earth civilisation by directing an asteroid at Earth.[16]
• The Hammer of God (1993), novel by Arthur C. Clarke. Mankind tries to stop an asteroid named Kali from hitting the Earth.
• Sliders episode "Last Days" (1995), television. The sliders team must invent the atom bomb to deflect an asteroid that is on target to destroy the Earth.
• "The Last Sunset" by Geoffrey A. Landis (1996): a short-story dealing with the emotional reaction to discovery of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.[17]
• Titan (1997), novel by Stephen Baxter. China tries to deflect an asteroid into Earth orbit to use as a weapons base, but instead causes it to hit Earth, presumably destroying all human life.
• Deep Impact (1998). film. Based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Hammer of God, although the asteroid becomes a comet[18] An unsuccessful attempt to alter the course of the asteroid by detonating nuclear devices on its surface, after which the astronauts involved pilot their ship into the asteroid's path to prevent it hitting Earth.
• Armageddon (1998), film. An asteroid is prevented from impacting the Earth by drilling into its core and planting nuclear bombs which split the asteroid in half. The two halves move in different directions and miss the Earth.
• In the Time of Dinosaurs (1998), a book in the Animorphs novel series. The Animorphs travel back in time to the Cretaceous period, where they encounter aliens living on Earth. They steal a nuclear device to try to create an explosion large enough to send them back to their time, but have to give it up in order to let one of the alien species, the Mercora, destroy a comet heading for Earth. They realize that this comet is the same one as the Cretaceous–Paleogene event, and they must ensure that it impacts Earth so that mammals, and eventually humans, evolve. They secretly disable the nuke and the resulting impact sends them back to their home time.
• The Last Train (Cruel Earth in North America), is a British six-part post-apocalyptic television drama serial first broadcast on the ITV network from 7 April 1999 – 6 May 1999. The serial was written by Matthew Graham and produced for ITV by Granada Television. A random group of individuals on a train to Sheffield are cryogenically frozen when a canister of gas is released in their carriage. They unfreeze to find the world in ruins. Decades have passed; they are some of the few humans to have survived an apocalyptic strike by an asteroid the size of Birmingham.
• Mission to Mars (2000), film. In one of the final scenes of the movie, three members of the Mars II spacecraft watch an alien three-dimensional projection of a large asteroid violently colliding with the planet Mars.
• Asteroid (2001), an episode of the radio drama series Radio Tales on National Public Radio. Based on the short story "The Star" by H. G. Wells, the drama chronicles the events surrounding the approach of an asteroid which is predicted to impact the earth and instead passes in a "near miss" that causes cataclysmic damage..
• Terraforming Earth (2001), novel by Jack Williamson. An asteroid impact wipes out most life on Earth. The only remaining humans are a small group of clones on an automated moon base, tasked with rebuilding civilization.
• "Collision Course" (2003), novel by Susan Nichols Ferrara.
• "Impact Winter" (2004), episode of The West Wing, television series. The White House staff prepare for a possible asteroid impact on the Earth.
• "Phantom Planet", the series finale of Danny Phantom (2004), features a giant asteroid originating from Saturn (nicknamed the "disasteroid" because of its enormous size) hurtling towards the Earth, with people helpless to stop it.
• The Mass Effect video game (2007) by BioWare featured a mission titled "Bring Down the Sky" in which the protagonist must prevent terrorists from dropping an asteroid on a human colony planet.
• In the ending of the Martha Speaks episode "Dogs in Space", an asteroid lands outside of Wagstaff City Elementary School, however, it is revealed to be a jetpack.
• "Wizards vs. Asteroid" (2011), episode of Wizards of Waverly Place, has the Russo family hearing of a giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth, and they go into space to activate the missile that got stuck in it and failed to detonate.
• The Last Policeman (2012), a murder mystery novel by Ben H. Winters set in Conord, New Hampshire, months before an asteroid hits the Earth. Also its sequels Countdown City (2013) and World of Trouble (2014).
• Inuyashiki (2014–2017), a manga series by Hiroya Oku.

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 kind of paradise planet, until probes in the 1960s revealed uninhabitable temperatures with a deadly carbon dioxide and sulfur atmosphere 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.

• Seetee Shock (1949) and Seetee Ship (1951), novels by Jack Williamson featured terraformed and antimatter asteroids.
• "Dumb Martian" (1952), short story by John Wyndham. A ruthless Earth man 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 lonely tour of duty on an asteroid orbiting Jupiter. In the power struggle between the two of them, isolated on the asteroid, the arrogant and chauvinistic Earth man finds that his "Dumb Martian" is not as dumb as he thought she was.
• Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953), juvenile novel by Isaac Asimov. The Asteroid Belt is the haunt of dangerous pirates. The hero, an agent of The Terran Empire, has not only his job but also a private score to settle with pirates who had killed 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.[19]
• "The Lonely" (1959), episode of The Twilight Zone, television series. A convict, serving a 40-year sentence in exile on an asteroid, is clandestinely given a robot woman as a companion.
• "Island in the Sky" (Uncle $crooge #29, Mar. 1960), comic by Carl Barks. Scrooge McDuck scouted the asteroid belt to find a safe location for his money. The story depicts the asteroid belt as being much denser than it actually is. There are also many very large asteroids, some having atmospheres and inhabitants. At least one is a virtual paradise, replete with lush vegetation including bananas, papayas, apples, nuts, wild rice and melons.
• "The Small Planets" (ca. 1960–62), episode of Gumby animation. Gumby searches for an asteroid to settle, but finds each one already inhabited by a reclusive and unfriendly child.
• Raiders From The Rings (1962) by Alan E. Nourse
• X-Men, comic book. The villain Magneto has used an asteroid called Asteroid M (X-Men #5, May 1964) as his base of operations, complete with an observation deck, hangar bays and medical facilities, using technology to conceal it from standard detection technology.
• "Tales of the Flying Mountains" (1970), short stories first published 1962–65 by Poul Anderson. Collection of short stories on the colonization of the asteroids.[20]
• Protector (1973), novel, and other short stories by Larry Niven. These stories explore the psychology of the "Belters", people born and raised in asteroid colonies. A similar society in the "Serpent Swarm" of asteroids in the Alpha Centauri system, are featured in some stories of the Man-Kzin Wars series.
• Gundam, anime and novel series by Yoshiyuki Tomino. Asteroids are utilized for a variety of purposes. In Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Several asteroids have been moved from the asteroid belt to positions in Earth's Lagrange points. The most prominent of these are Solomon and A Baoa Qu, major space fortresses of the Principality of Zeon. Juno, formerly a mining asteroid, is renamed Luna II and moved to the L3 Lagrangian point opposite to the Moon. It becomes the Earth Federation's main space military base during and after the story. . Solomon and A Baoa Qu eventually fall into the Federation's hands, and are renamed Konpei Island and Gate of Zedan, respectively. In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985), Axis is a former asteroid mining colony that has become the stronghold of the Axis Zeon faction. Originally located in the asteroid belt, Axis is equipped with thermonuclear pulse thrusters in order to travel to Earth. Axis arrives in the Earth Sphere late in the Gryps Conflict, and the alliances Axis forms drastically alter the balance of power.
• The Venus Belt (1981), novel in the North American Confederation series by L. Neil Smith. A social system of total free enterprise on asteroids.
• Ender's Game (1985) and Ender's Shadow novels by Orson Scott Card. The Asteroid Belt is mainly a military zone, housing the bases and institutions dedicated to the war against Earth's insectoid invaders. A major part of both books takes place at Command 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 Way (1985–1996), series of novels by Greg Bear. There is a colony inside a hollowed-out asteroid.
• Blue Mars (1996), novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, and 2312, set in the same background: The colonization of asteroids and how new technology affects their development.
• Futurama (1999–2003, 2008–2013). Humans have inhabited asteroids with single homes in the asteroid belt.
• Asteroid Wars (2001–2007), novels by Ben Bova. Warfare by corporations for control of the asteroid belt.
• The Expanse, a novel series, and The Expanse, a television show, where humanity has colonized Ceres and several other asteroids.
• The 100 (2014–present), a television series about space. Asteroid colonies have been mentioned.

Before colonization of the asteroids became an attractive possibility, a main interest in them was theories as to their origin – specifically, the theory that the asteroids are remnants of an exploded planet. This naturally leads to SF plot lines dealing with the possibility that the planet had been inhabited, and if so – that the inhabitants caused its destruction themselves, by war or gross environmental mismanagement. A further extension is from the past of the existing asteroids to the possible future destruction of Earth or other planets and their rendering into new asteroids.

For a list of "fifth planets" in fiction, see Fictional planets of the Solar System

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 subgenre 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.

• Seetee Ship (1951) and Seetee Shock (1949) 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.
• Beyond Mars (1952–1955), comic strip in The New York Sunday News by Jack Williamson. Loosely based on the novel Seetee Ship.
• "Catch That Rabbit", short story by Isaac Asimov in the collection I, Robot (1950). A lonely asteroid mining station is the location for an intractable robot mystery and tangle.
• The Rolling Stones (1952), novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The family Stone travels to the Asteroid Belt, where the twins of the family hope to sell food and luxury items to the miners extracting radioactive ores.
• Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet (1952), young adult novel by Harold L. Goodwin under the pseudonym Blake Savage; alternately published under the title Assignment in Space with Rip Foster. Planeteer Rip Foster undertakes capturing an asteroid of pure thorium and steering it to earth orbit.
• "The Talking Stone" (1955), short story by Isaac Asimov. A group of miners is killed before they can reveal the coordinates of an asteroid particularly rich in uranium.
• "The Rogue" (1963), short story by Poul Anderson. A tense love affair takes place 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 Washington 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 interstellar 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.[20]
• Known Space (1964 onward) series of stories by Larry Niven. The Solar System is divided between the U.N.-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 World of Ptavvs. In this universe, it is planets such as Mars which are the neglected backwaters, Belters spurning them and their gravity wells as fit only for "Flatlanders".
• The Men in the Jungle (1967), novel by Norman Spinrad. 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 Fraden. 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 plot line.
• "Tinker" (1975), short story in the collection High Justice, vol. 1 of the Future History series by Jerry Pournelle. The Asteroid Belt is dominated by a consortium of multinational corporations (upgraded to multi-planetary corporations by this time). Pournelle deliberately turns upside down the well-established rules of this subgenre 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".
• Heechee (1976–2004) series of stories by Frederik Pohl. Explorers discover an asteroid orbiting perpendicular to the solar plane, filled with hundreds of small spaceships left aeons ago by a mysterious alien race which humans call "Heechee". Named Gateway by the discovers, the powerful nations of the world occupy the asteroid and subsequently form the Gateway Corporation to administer the object. Under their open eye, there develops a culture of adventurers and prospectors rather similar to that portrayed in other asteroid books. Here, however, the prospecting is not for mineral wealth but rather for interstellar discovery, to which the adventurers set out blindly in the hardly understood alien ships, in trips which can end with riches or death.
• Red Dwarf (1988–1999), television series. Asteroids have presumably been mined for at least several decades, as Dave Lister is once heard singing a futuristic version of "Clementine" – "On an asteroid / Evacuating for a mine / Lived an old plutonium miner / And his daughter Clementine...". The Jupiter Mining Corporation, which operates the ship Red Dwarf, presumably mines on asteroids (Red Dwarf itself mined the Neptunian moon Triton, according to the novels).
• The Stone Dogs (1990), novel in the Draka series by S. M. Stirling. The Asteroid Belt is 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". Following "The Final War" of that history's 1998, the tough Asteroid miners are the last holdout against the victorious Draka. Though they eventually defect to the Draka, they are first able to launch "New America", a huge starship carrying some 100,000 colonists to the stars, to keep the cause alive and fight again another day.
• Heavy Time (1991), novel by C. J. Cherryh. Mining of the asteroid belt of Earth's solar system is a critical part of the economy in the 24th century. A dispute over mining rights to a particularly large asteroid rich with valuable minerals involves ASTEX, a giant mining corporation, and the book describes in detail ASTEX's mining operations in the asteroid belt.
• Several short stories by Geoffrey A. Landis, including "Outsider's Chance" (1998) and "Betting on Eureka" (2005), deal with mining asteroids.[21]
• Live Free or Die (2010), novel by John Ringo. Asteroids are melted by sunlight concentrated by a distributed network of orbital mirrors, allowing the centripetal force of the asteroid's own rotation to separate it into concentric layers of its component materials, which are then peeled off one-by-one. One asteroid, known as Troy, is drilled into, stuffed with ice, and then melted, inflating it into a hollow metal shell 14 km (9 mi) in diameter and over 1.6 km (1 mi) thick, which is then developed into a space station used to defend the solar system from invading aliens.

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 seafaring 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, even in the asteroid belt, asteroids are spaced extremely far apart (even so, they can still be a risk to ships travelling at high speeds).

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), film. 2001 accurately (and, for a work of fiction, atypically) depicts a "close approach" between the Discovery One and a binary asteroid while 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.
• 2061: Odyssey Three (1986), novel by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke dispenses with the relative monotony of the journey from the first book, and instead applies ominous parallels to the journey of the RMS Titanic. During writing the novel, the Titanic's wreck had just been found.
• The Wreck of The River of Stars (2003), novel by Michael Flynn. Themes of nautical adventure novels are transferred to an Asteroid Belt environment, with a dramatic account of cumulative accidents, mismatched good intentions and power struggles among crew members in a former space luxury liner turned tramp freighter (the "River of Stars" of the title) which culminate in a disastrous collision with an asteroid.
• Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets (2004), television drama documentary by the BBC. The Pegasus encounters a binary asteroid from much closer than expected, and dubs the rocks "Hubris" and "Catastrophe" as a result.
• Once Upon a Time... Space (1982), cartoon. Asteroid belts depicted there are presented unrealistically dense, allowing among other events to emulate the famous chase scene of The Empire Strikes Back.

A theme related to that of the Fifth Planet is the generation of a new asteroid belt, via the demolition of a planet, sometimes the Earth. The energy required to reduce a planet such as Earth to loose rubble is truly enormous: about 2×10³² J, equivalent to the Sun's entire luminous energy output for about a week!

• Facing the Flag (1896), novel by Jules Verne. A mad genius invents an enormously powerful new explosive, of which a few grams suffice to blow a passable tunnel through many metres of tough volcanic rock. One of the story's villains remarks that several thousand tons might be enough to blow up the entire Earth and render it into a new asteroid belt – which (though no character in the story has any desire to actually try it) seems to be the first time that such a suggestion was made in science fiction.
• Worlds of the Imperium (1962), novel by Keith Laumer. 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.
• The Corridors of Time (1965), novel by Poul Anderson. 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 and its remnants become a new Asteroid Belt. The two fighting sides tacitly agree to use more subtle forms of fighting, involving mainly time-travel.
• The Venus Belt (1980), novel by L. Neil Smith. The "useless" planet Venus is deliberately blown up to create a new asteroid belt. It is part of a genre of asteroid SF in which asteroids are rated as more valuable than planets.

• Eon (1985), science fiction novel by Greg Bear. The asteroid Juno appears as a hollowed out asteroid/starship from the future, called the Thistledown.
• The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon episode "Poor Little Rich Turtle" includes Krang and Shredder trying to turn an asteroid into a spacecraft.

• Protector (1973), novel by Larry Niven. 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.
• Footfall (1985), novel by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Elephant-like aliens launch an asteroid which lands in the Indian Ocean, causing a huge tsunami which almost completely wipes out life in India and causes enormous damage to all countries which have shores on that ocean.
• Metal Armor Dragonar (1987), anime. The Lunar-based Giganos Empire uses a mass driver to fire asteroids at the Earth and space colonies.
• The Last Command (1993), novel by Timothy Zahn set in the Star Wars universe. The Galactic Empire makes a number of asteroids invisible and places them in low orbit around the New Republic controlled world Coruscant, forcing them to divert resources from the war effort to find them before they deorbit and hit the densely populated city.
• Starship Troopers (1997), film, loosely based on the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Aliens launch an asteroid at Earth, completely wiping out Buenos Aires. This is the opening move in the war.
• "Fail Safe" (2002), episode of Stargate SG-1 television series. A Goa'uld surreptitiously diverts an asteroid to a collision course with Earth.
• Sunstorm (2005), novel by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke. Extraterrestrials attempt to cause Earth's destruction by way of a "cosmic bullet" projectile sent into the Sun.
• Live Free or Die (2010) and its sequel Citadel by John Ringo, in which asteroids are melted, inflated, and turned into unstoppable battleships of space.
• Nemesis Games (2015) and Babylon's Ashes (2016), novels by James S. A. Corey where asteroids are used as weapons to attack Earth.