Now, when I finished writing Pride & Planetoids and was running it through automations and all that jazz, my parents were in the process of moving. They didn’t end up beta reading it the way they do most of my books. When they did read it after it released, Dad asked me: “Why would Terra be willing to let Albion pack up a fleet of resource-rich asteroids and fly them off to the Copernicus system? These rocks sit in a region of space that Terra claims sovereignty over and merely leases to Albion. What’s in it for Terra to allow the exodus at all?”

To answer that, I have to unpack some ideas that are deep in the background of the setting, and not really explained by the characters in the book. Elizabeth Bennet, William Darcy, and Effie Price don’t pay attention to these ideas for the same reason that fish don’t pay attention to water.

Two Philosophies of Asteroid Law

The short answer starts with property rights. Under Albion law, any family or corporation that can develop an asteroid may claim ownership of it, subject to certain procedural requirements. It is in this sense that Mr. Darcy’s ancestors could claim an unusually large, spherical asteroid and transform it into the marcher-ship Last Repose. It is in this sense that Mr. Bennet’s ancestors could stake a claim to Longbourn and accumulate ownership of smaller fragments in its vicinity.

Helles operates on a fundamentally different model. In Hellenic law, the government owns all asteroids in Helles Space and grants development concessions to individual citizens. Theron Vikelas, for instance, holds a concession to sell diamonds in Albion Space. Presumably he or someone like him holds a concession from the government to mine the diamonds in the first place.

These two systems sit right up against each other in the Hector-Sabrina family, which generates most of the political friction in the novel.

What the Lease Probably Says

The Copernicus Expedition was the original stated purpose behind the Albion settlements in the Kuiper Belt, and the plan was always to use the asteroid belt as a staging ground, not a permanent home. I have to assume the Albion lease contains something to the effect of: …And it’s okay for you to make generation-ships out of Hector-Sabrina rocks and fly them to Copernicus. In appropriately boring legal language, of course.

Which brings us to why Terra isn’t particularly upset about this. The assumption behind most asteroid-mining fiction is that Earth wants those mineral resources desperately enough to fight over them. Color me skeptical. By the time humanity has the energy production and technical capability to extract and transport asteroid resources at scale, it will almost certainly be cheaper and easier to extract and recycle the mineral resources already available on Earth, as it is today. We are not currently strip-mining the Main Asteroid Belt; it’s just not economical to do so. I personally don’t think that equation is going to change.

So in the Pride & Planetoids setting, I portrayed Terra as far more invested in the social media streams coming out of Albion Space and Helles Space than in the mineral wealth of Hector-Sabrina. The resource Terra is actually extracting is the entertainment value of watching the cultures of Helles and Albion in action.

Why Not Use the Marcher-Ships for Freight?

A reasonable follow-up question: the setting has teleportation-capable ships. Why isn’t anyone using that technology to move asteroid resources cheaply?

The short answer is that the marcher-ships and Terra’s peacekeepers represent extraordinarily expensive technology to operate, at least in terms of energy. Nobody builds mega-freighters on that principle when slower, cheaper methods exist. The technology that enables the Last Repose to leap through space in the blink of an eye is not the technology you press into cargo service, for the same reason you don’t use a Formula 1 car to deliver groceries.

On the other hand, it is the kind of technology you reserve for more existential tasks, like projecting force to protect your interests, which is what Terra uses it for. Or defense against asteroid collision events, which is what Albion uses it for. Or the quest to explore and settle interstellar space, which is what Elizabeth and Darcy hope to use it for. Will they succeed? Well, read the book for yourself and find out! 😉