Or young, as the case may be. Instead of toiling about the desert with a pick-ax and a burro, our space-age protagonist would be putzing about the cosmos with a busted crystal detector in a rust-bucket of a spaceship, barely getting by.
I know I’ve seen the trope lifted from the Western to Space Opera but cannot recall any examples right off. Probably a few characters in Heinlein’s juveniles fit the bill.
Short stories or novels.
Thanks in advance.
Sir Rhosis
Just to add: The protagonist need not literally be a prospector. I suppose I’m looking for stories in which a character is basically living on the edge or the lower rung of star-spanning future societies. Maybe he (or she) is a Han Solo type, barely above the law, or even breaking it here and there. Maybe he is a smuggler, a shoddy tour guide, etc.
Sir Rhosis
The classic examples are the Mars and Venus short stories by Leigh Brackett. (ETA: And the “Northwest Smith” stories by C. L. Moore)
You might want to do some poking around in the Planet Stories shop.
(Aside: Holy crap! They reprinted Robots Have no Tails? Sweet!!!)
ETA again: Haffner Press has also reprinted a bunch of Brackett stories.
There are a couple of examples of this in the Man-Kzin Wars series of books, about Capt. Bob Saxtorph and his (and his wife’s) ship, The Rover. But they are few and far between.
There are “Belters” in this series as well, humans living in asteroid belts and prospecting for metals, and many stories take place in Earth’s and Alpha Centauri’s asteroid belts, but this is mostly background scenery, with the stories being mostly intrigue oriented, or military/action.
That’s all I got.
“Death by Ecstacy”, a short story by Larry Niven. Collected in The Long A.R.M. of Gil Hamilton and Flatlander. The asteroid mining is backstory for an earthbound story, but the flashbacks are fairly important.
Protector, by Larry Niven.
I would nominate Andre Norton’s Solar Queen novels: Sargasso of Space, Plague Ship, Voodoo Planet, and Postmarked the Stars. The Solar Queen is a free trader, and its members are not exactly rich. They were written for kids, but I find them pretty entertaining.
In Robert Heinlein’s juvenile Between Planets, Don Harvey works as a dishwasher for a while. It’s pretty good for light reading. Several of the stories in his mammoth collection The Past Through Tomorrow feature people who have mundane jobs in future societies.
Poul Anderson’s collection *Tales of the Flying Mountains *looks at a society in the Asteroid Belt.
That’s the very story I was thinking of.
Great asteroid mining community!
Frederik Pohl’s classic Gateway, about a prospector looking for alien artifacts.
But for Og’s sake skip the sequels!
Humanity’s first contact with a living alien in The Mote in God’s Eye is with a Motie prospector, who gleans precious metals from… well, I don’t want to give too much of the book away.
Toward the end of its run, Star Trek Voyager shows that all of the Federation’s other Emergency Medical Holograms are being used as virtual slaves (pun intended) for asteroid mining.
Asimov’s The Martian Way is about a society of Scavengers, who scour the spaceways for used lower stages of spacecraft, which they mine for their metal. Th3ey are individuals who spend long periods alone in cramped spaceships and I think that they would fit your idea of prospectors.
C.J. Cherryh’s Merchanter novels are basically about tramp-traders living on the edge in the lower rung of a star-spanning future society. They’re not a series or sequels; although they share common themes they can be read alone.
Judgement on Janus, Catseye, and Night of Masks by Andre Norton, are all about people living in slums on other planets.
While it’s not specifically the focus of the stories, H. Beam Piper’s “Little Fuzzy” series (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens, and Fuzzies and Other People), has protagonist Jack Holloway, who’s an old hardbitten-but-kindly prospector of “sunstones” (bioluminescent gems, highly valuable) on a far-off frontier planet controlled by a huge corporation. Jack stays put on one planet so there’s no spaceship, but he might fit your bill.
Snake Eyes is a Flinx short story by Alan Dean Foster ( it can be found in Who Needs Enemies? ) where Flinx encounters an old prospector who’s made a strike, and the claim jumpers who try to kill them and steal it.
You might also look into Jack Williamson’s Seetee books. They’re about asteroid miners who are looking for anti-matter asteroids. (He calls anti-matter “contra-terrene” matter, which they abbreviate CT or “seetee”.) Yeah, they wind up involving aliens but I think are close to what you are looking for.
Red Dwarf (which is set on a Mining Ship located 3,000,000 years into deep space) have a couple of episodes in which the characters mine on other planets or salvage space hulks, usually with disastrous results…
Cities in Flight, by James Blish. The “prospector” in this case being entire cities, fitted with anti-gravity devices, which fly around the galaxy doing odd-jobs like mining and refining.
Most of the examples given this far aren’t really what the Op is asking for – Gateway is a great novel, but it ain’t about a prospector looking for stuff on an alien world. Not even close. Ditto most of the other suggestions.
You CAN find what the OP is looking for in much short SF from the 1950s, especially the work of Robert Sheckley and other short-fiction writers, like Fredric Brown. One Sheckley story that precisely fits the bill is \Prospector’s Special, which has been anthologized.
