Seetee series

Seetee Shock

Dust-jacket from the first edition
Author	Will Stewart
Cover artist	Edward R. Collins
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	1950
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	238

Seetee Ship

Dust-jacket from the first edition
Author	Will Stewart
Cover artist	Edd Cartier
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publisher	Gnome Press
Publication date	1951
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	255

The Seetee series is a golden age science fiction story series by the American writer Jack Williamson (writing under the pseudonym "Will Stewart"). The stories follow a small group of late-22nd century Asteroid Belt colonists as they attempt to harness the titular seetee (a phonetic for "CT" or "contraterrene [matter]," an obsolete term for antimatter), initially for the advancement of humanity and later to win the Belt's independence from the authoritarian Mandate.

Publication history

The series' constituents were originally published as seven short story-length installments in Astounding Science Fiction magazine:

• "Collision Orbit" (short story, July 1942)
• "Minus Sign" (short story, November 1942)
• "Opposites—React!" (novelette, serialized January–February 1943)
• Seetee Shock (novel, serialized February–April 1949)
• Seetee Ship (novel, 1951, fixup of "Minus Sign" and "Opposites—React!")

The first three stories were published in rapid succession between late 1942 and early 1943; after a six-year hiatus, Williamson revisited the setting with Seetee Shock, a novel-length story serialized in Astounding between February and April 1949 and released in book form by Simon & Schuster the following year. The second and third stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, Seetee Ship, released in 1951 by Gnome Press in an edition of 4,000 copies and subsequent reprinted by several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. (The first story, "Collision Orbit," was not collected in either the Gnome or in any later omnibus edition.)

In 1952, Williamson was invited to create a weekly newspaper comic, Beyond Mars, for which he reused much of the physical setting and technological base of the Seetee series, but not the books' continuity. The strip's lead character was a pastiche of several of the series' protagonists, and its versions of Mars and Venus were home to intelligent alien races. Plots tended toward generic adventures involving space pirates and mad scientists, with no greater-scope allusions to solar-system politics; notably, the stories' repressive High Space Guard was transformed into a benign law-enforcement agency.

Setting

In the late 22nd century, the Asteroid Belt is inhabited by human colonists known as "asterites," having been made habitable decades ago through the use of "paragravity" technology. The asteroids nonetheless remain a dangerous environment due to the "contraterrene drift," a scattering of antimatter ranging from dust to sizeable asteroids, comprising twelve percent of the mass of the Belt. They represent the aftermath of an ancient collision between the "Invader," a Mars-sized rogue planet made of antimatter, and "Adonis," a slightly-larger conventional-matter world that had once orbited between Mars and Jupiter.

The asterites are governed by the High Space Mandate, a multilateral administration run by the major powers of the Solar System: the (American-dominated) Earth-Moon Union, the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and the pan-Asian (but Chinese-dominated) Venus Empire. The Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, which holds a century-old monopoly on uranium, is a silent fifth partner, and all-but-controls the Earth-Moon Union as well.

The Mandate, headquartered on the asteroid Pallas, had been established in 2171 at the conclusion of a decade-long war between Earth and its colonies, in which all but the Moon gained independence. After the war, the asterites - despite having fought on the colonial side in the hope of declaring an independent High Space Union - were betrayed by their former allies and reduced to a protectorate of the Mandate, which the relatively moderate Venusians and Jovians had permitted Earth to join in order to counterbalance the hard-line Martian Reich.

Plot

"Collision Orbit" begins in early 2191 on the sleepy colonized asteroid Obania, which is suddenly endangered by a smaller asteroid after a random collision with an antimatter body alters its orbit. "Spatial engineer" Jim Drake, tugboat pilot Rob McGee, and young heiress Ann O'Banion decide to divert the asteroid, which would enable them to claim it in recompense; their ultimate plan is to repurpose it as a laboratory for Drake's antimatter experimentation. However, an attempt to install a paragravity engine at the center of the asteroid (which they name Freedonia) fails due to a combination of bad luck and economic sabotage by Mandate authorities. In the end, Drake succeeds by steering a mass of anti-iron into a borehole, where the resultant matter-antimatter reaction functions as an improvised rocket and propels Freedonia into a safe orbit. The Mandate reluctantly recognizes Drake's claim, and his son Rick - angered and disillusioned by the Mandate's treatment of his father, and inspired by his success - returns to join the family business.

"Minus Sign" begins in March 2191, immediately after the conclusion of the preceding story, but switches viewpoints to Rick Drake, also a spatial engineer and a rising star with Interplanet who has just joined Drake, McGee and Drake as a partner. The venture is immediately in danger of losing Freedonia due to an inflated tax assessment, prompting the younger Drake and McGee to set out for a mysterious asteroid exhibiting anomalous properties which has just been accelerated by to solar escape velocity by a seetee collision. The voyage becomes a race against a Mandate science expedition commanded by the affable, cooly-superior Earthman Paul Anders, but upon arrival at the nameless asteroid the two ships experience strange phenomena, and an unidentified warship appears and exchanges fire with the Mandate cruiser. McGee eventually figures out that the asteroid - while composed of normal matter - hails from a region of the universe where the arrow of time is reversed, and that they are being carried into the past as long they remain within its proximity. Drake and McGee escape the asteroid just before its yet-to-happen collision with the antimatter body, salvaging a large amount of mined industrial diamonds and the survivors of the Mandate cruiser, which had been destroyed in a battle with its earlier self.

"Opposites—React!" begins six months later, and again switches viewpoints - this time to Paul Anders, who is returning to service after a period of convalescence, having lost much of his enthusiasm for the Mandate and for Interplanet. Earth's Commissioner in the Belt shows him evidence that the Martians have located a contraterrene alien artifact, and assigns him a cruiser crewed by dissidents from the Mandate powers that are loyal to Interplanet. Anders gives Ann O'Banion a lift to Freedonia, where he inspects the antimatter lab the Drakes have built, and learns that they have reached an impasse in their research, as they cannot damp the vibrations of the anti-iron they are attempting to work with. He reluctantly threatens his hosts with imprisonment unless they consent to an Interplanet buyout, but the situation changes when McGee calls to report that he has located an intact seetee artifact in an eccentric orbit above the ecliptic, but is being menaced by a Martian Reich warship. With O'Banion aboard, Anders' cruiser travels to the artifact, which turns out to be an enormous ovoid space station built by the long-vanished inhabitants of the destroyed extrasolar antimatter world. Anders and O'Banion enter the artifact and learn it is a matter-antimatter annihilation power plant, consisting of matter and antimatter hemispheres separated by a sophisticated physical-contact interface - exactly what humans need to work with antimatter. They also find the bodies of a Jovian Soviet expedition, recently killed by the still-active station's dangerous unattended processes, and a live Rob McGee. Attempting to return to the ship, the three find themselves marooned by the Martian spy Falkenberg, who had been impersonating Anders' first officer and had suborned his crew. However, McGee had managed to hide his own spacecraft in the antimatter half of the artifact; Anders - who has fallen in love with O'Banion - renounces the Mandate, and the trio returns to the Belt with the secret of the interface. They learn that the hijacked cruiser had gone to Freedonia to destroy the Drakes' antimatter lab, but had fallen victim to a minefield around the asteroid, whose existence Anders had withheld from Falkenberg.

Seetee Shock begins several years later. Drake, McGee and Drake has been driven into bankruptcy by Mandate lawfare, but Martin Brand, a celebrity spatial engineer and former acquaintance of Jim Drake, has salvaged the firm and renamed it "Seetee Inc." His nephew, the young Nicol Jenkins, has come from Earth to work for him on Freedonia, though he is plagued with anxiety in the hostile environment.

Reviews

Groff Conklin gave Seetee Ship a mixed review, finding it "a good story if you can bear ploughing through pages of literary corn starch." P. Schuyler Miller noted that Williamson's rewrite of the stories into a more cohesive novel was "an excellent job of unification." New York Times reviewer Villiers Gersen, however, commented that "it is a pity that the quality of Stewart's writing [...] ranks only slightly above that of a comic-strip adventure."

"Terraforming"

The word "terraforming" was a neologism coined in Collision Orbit, although the concept itself had been suggested previously. Willliamson's definition of the term in the story differs significantly from the concept's later development; he applied it to a process for creating a shirt-sleeve environment on very small asteroids, by installing a fictional "paragravity" unit at their centers, thereby endowing them with Earth-level gravity and making them capable of retaining a breathable atmosphere.

During the 1980s, American geographer Richard Cathcart successfully lobbied for formal recognition of the verb "to terraform". The word was added to the fourth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 1993.

See also

• Terraforming in popular culture

General and cited references

• Chalker, Jack L.; Owings, Mark (1998). The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923–1998. Westminster, MD and Baltimore: Mirage Press, Ltd. p. 299.
• Contento, William G. "Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections". Retrieved 2008-02-25.
• Seetee series listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Williamson, Jack; Higgins, William S. (2010). Opposites—React!. Royal Oak, Michigan: Haffner Press. p. 158.