Asteroid of Fear

Vesta is a dead world, a fragment of an alien planet that shattered from within and now drifts through the asteroid belt. John Endlich came here to escape: his gambling debts, his drinking, the violence that nearly cost him everything. Rose and the kids need a husband and father, not a wreck. So he signs on with the Homesteaders Office to terraform this airless rock, to make something grow where nothing should survive. But the miners already on Vesta want him gone. They poison his water supply, sabotage his equipment, threaten his children. They are going to kill him if he doesn't kill them first. Gallun's 1951 novel is a frontier story transplanted to the stars, a man fighting to build a new life while old enemies close in and his own worst impulses threaten from within. The question isn't whether he can tame Vesta. It's whether he can tame himself.