Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
If your goal is to setup manufacturing in space, then that's far more complicated. You'd be working with massive amounts of low-value metals and refining them into aluminum, or steel, or whatever it is you need the most of right now, and then turning the metal into usable parts for habitats or ships or mining equipment. (Whatever is too bulky to be cost effective to ship from Earth.) Again, I don't know enough about metal refining processes to make much of a guess what the logistics would entail, but I can predict it'll need a lot of intermediate products and chemicals which might or might not be available on-site, and it would consume an enormous amount of energy. That could be from solar (though the asteroid belt is quite a bit farther from the sun than we're at) or nuclear.
Nuclear generally doesn't work well in space because there's not usually any good way to get rid of excess heat, but conducting the heat to a large asteroid could work pretty well. So then you'd just have the usual barrier that putting a reactor is space will require a launch from Earth, and that makes everyone rightly nervous.