Seetee series
 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 science fiction series by American writer Jack Williamson (writing under the pseudonym "Will Stewart.") It consists of several books and stories set in the late 22nd century, amid space-dwelling Asteroid Belt miners who resist tyrannical central authority while harvesting the titular seetee (a phonetic for "CT" or "contraterrene" matter, an obsolete term for antimatter.)
Publication History
All the prose entries in the series were initially published in 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!)
- Beyond Mars (comic strip, 1952–1955)
The short story Collision Orbit was published in the July 1942 issue,[1] and was followed by "Minus Sign" (in the November 1942 issue) and "Opposites—React!" (two installments in January and February 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. The second and third stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, released as Seetee Ship in 1951 by Gnome Press[2] in an edition of 4,000 copies, and had subsequent reprintings from several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. (The first story in the series, "Collision Orbit," was not collected in either of the Gnome Press books, or in any later omnibus editions.)
The stories' internal chronological order is identical to their order of publication, save for the 1951 fix-up Seetee Ship, which is set at a later point than Seetee Shock (1949), the first part of the series to be published in book form.
The 1952 comic strip Beyond Mars was directly based on the Seetee series, with a very similar setting, characters, and technology base, but did not share the same continuity; the strip's departures included Mars and Venus each being home to an an intelligent alien race, and solar-system politics and antimatter not playing a major part in the story.
Plot
"Collision Orbit" follows spatial engineer Jim Drake and tugboat pilot Rob McGee as they change the orbit of a rogue asteroid, thereby obtaining legal claim to it.
"Minus Sign" begins in March 2191, immediately after the conclusion of the preceding story. Jim Drake's son, spatial engineer Rick Drake continues his father's quest to tame seetee, but becomes entangled in the interplanetary politics of energy shortage.
In "Opposites—React!" a contraterrene alien artifact is discovered, and competing parties race to reach it and learn its secrets.[3] The plot of the later book version differs somewhat from the magazine version, particularly in incorporating the speculation that time might run backwards in the neighborhood of a contraterrene object.
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."[4] P. Schuyler Miller noted that Williamson's rewrite of the stories into a more cohesive novel was "an excellent job of unification."[5] 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."[6]
"Terraforming"
The word "terraforming" was a neologism coined in Collision Orbit, although the concept itself had been suggested previously.[7][8] 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. [9]
See also
References
- ^ "Jack Williamson". Symmetry Magazine. Retrieved 12 August 2014.
- ^ Seetee Ship, The Gnome Press Release. Retrieved 26 December 2017.
- ^ William S. Higgins, "The Road to Seetee," in Jack Williamson, Opposites—React!, Haffner Press, 2010, p. 23-24
- ^ "Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf," Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1951, p.100
- ^ "The Reference Library", Astounding Science Fiction, November 1951, p.118
- ^ "Realm of the Spacemen", The New York Times, October 7, 1951
- ^ "Science Fiction Citations: terraforming". Jesse Word. Retrieved 12 August 2014.
- ^ "Collision Orbit". ISFDB. Retrieved 12 August 2014.
- ^ *Fogg, Martyn J. (1995), Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, SAE, pp. 9, 16, ISBN 1-56091-609-5.
Sources
- ISFDB listing: Seetee Ship
- Chalker, Jack L.; Owings, Mark (1998). The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923-1998. Westminster, MD and Baltimore: Mirage Press, Ltd. p. 299.
- Williamson, Jack; Higgins, William S. (2010). Opposites—React!. Royal Oak, Michigan: Haffner Press. p. 158.
- Contento, William G. "Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections". Retrieved 2008-02-25.