The Seetee series is a golden age science fiction series by the American writer Jack Williamson, under the pseudonym "Will Stewart." The narrative follows a small group of late-22nd century Asteroid Belt colonists who attempt to harness the titular seetee (a phonetic for "ContraTerrene", an obsolete term for antimatter), both for the advancement of humanity and to secure the Belt's independence from an authoritarian colonial administration.
Publication history The series' constituent stories were originally published as seven installments in Astounding Science Fiction. Six years after the publication of the first three stories, Williamson revisited the setting with Seetee Shock, a novel serialized in Astounding in early 1949 and released in book form by Simon & Schuster the following year. The second and third stories were subsequently combined into the fix-up Seetee Ship, released in 1951 by Gnome Press in an edition of 4,000 copies. Seetee Ship was reprinted by several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. ("Collision Orbit" has not been 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. The following is a list of all publications in the series:
"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)
Setting In the late 22nd century, the Asteroid Belt is home to human colonists known as "asterites", who have made many minor bodies habitable through "paragravity" technology. The Belt nonetheless remains a dangerous environment due to the "contraterrene drift", a scattering of antimatter ranging from dust to sizeable asteroids; it comprises twelve percent of the mass of the Belt, and represents the aftermath of an ancient collision between two Mars-size worlds, an extrasolar planet made of antimatter (nicknamed "the Invader") and the slightly-larger "Adonis", which had once orbited between Mars and Jupiter. The Belt is administered by the High Space Mandate, a condomininum of the major powers of the Solar System: the (American-dominated) Earth-Moon Union, the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and the pan-Asian Venusian Empire. The powerful Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, with a century-old Solar-System-wide monopoly on uranium, is a silent partner, and de facto controls the Earth-Moon Union. The Mandate, headquartered on the asteroid Pallas, dates from 2171, the conclusion of a decade-long war between Earth and its colonies in which all but the Moon gained independence. The asterites - despite having fought on the colonial side in the hope of establishing an independent High Space Union - had been reduced to a protectorate by their former allies, who wanted access to their reserves of uranium. However, the relatively moderate Venusians and Jovians had permitted Earth to join the Mandate in order to counterbalance the hard-line Martian Reich.
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