Entanglement, by Gerald Kilby

This is the first book in The Belt series.

In chapter 5, a binary asteroid system is described - two asteroids of almost equal mass, "both locked in an eternal dance around each other". They both have a diameter of more than 90 kilometres. A spacecraft is then described as being "in a low orbit around the larger of the two". Now, I'm not an astrophysicist, but I didn't think it was possible for an object to orbit just one of a binary system like this - it would have to orbit the common centre of gravity of the binary pair.

A couple of pages later, one of the crew of a spaceship which has a rotating torus to create artificial gravity "made his way from the comfortable one-gee environment of the rotating torus, down through one of the connecting spokes, and into the weightless environment of…" Why on earth (or in space for that matter) would anyone describe moving from a 1-g environment to weightlessness as "down"? Starting from the centre of the torus, every direction towards the outside is "down", therefore from the edge towards the centre must be "up". It happens again in chapter 9.

Still in chapter 5, the dwarf planet Ceres is quoted as having a gravity of 0.27% that of Earth. In fact it's 0.27m.s^-2, or 2.9% that of Earth's.

Once we do reach chapter 9, another asteroid is described as "a small, potato-shaped rock, only three kilometres in diameter at its narrowest and not quite five kilometres long". It might be three kilometres in diameter at its widest, but surely it's zero kilometres across at its narrowest (ie: at either end, just before it runs out of rock altogether)?

By the time we get to chapter 25, "His lower body sustained a few cracked ribs and a lot of bruising."

I wonder where his upper body ends and his lower body starts.

All in all, it's an adequate story, which could really benefit from a competent proofreader or editor, but it's nowhere near the standard of his earlier work Colony Mars. That one is simply great - just read it.

Entanglement is followed by Entropy.

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