Short Story: The Singing Diamond

"The Singing Diamond" by Dr. Robert L. Forward as published in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Quotes:

 My asteroid was singing.

The auto-robots brought it to us-still warm. It was a diamond-with a flaw. Right in the center of the barrel-size crystal was a thick sheet of highly reflecting metal.

Synopsis:

Red Vengeance has a problem. She has found her big score. An asteroid with enough valuable minerals in it to set her up for life. But it's being orbited-by something. Something that can go through iron like it's not there and cut through her space suit, and leg, with brutal efficiency. And it sings. After pulling herself back to the safety of her ship she almost gives up on her treasure trove, when she remembers a laboratory nearby in the Belt that were experienced with dealing with many strange and dangerous phenomena. 

She gets her asteroid towed to the lab and they figure out how to remove the orbiting menace and she gets her big score. But that pales in comparison to what they discover about the mysterious phenomenon.

Thoughts:

I enjoyed this story, but, one issue I had was the slow reveal of the protagonists gender. Forward takes his time revealing the fact the Red is a woman, and you can almost hear him giggling and saying, "Ooh, you thought the space miner was a man! But it's a woman! I've blown your mind and completely subverted all of your expectations!"

And I just groan and reply, "No. No you haven't. Not even in 1979 when the story was first published was that at all shocking. You were at least a few decades past that qualifying as a shocking reveal."

The thing is the protagonist being a woman does not matter to the story at all. Not even a little bit. This story is not about the characters. It's about the phenomena and how they deal with it. When he sticks to that it's an enjoyable little hard sf tale. That said, I don't really think short fiction was his strength. He did much better in novels, at least in the ones I've read of his. The novel length gave him space to flesh out his ideas, and deliver more satisfying stories.