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.) The series consists of: * Collision Orbit (short story, July 1942, Astounding Science Fiction) * Minus Sign (short story, November 1942, Astounding Science Fiction) * Opposites—React! (novelette, serialized January–February 1943 in Astounding Science Fiction) * Seetee Shock (novel, serialized February–April 1949 in Astounding Science Fiction) * Seetee Ship (novel, 1951, fixup of ''Minus Sign'' and ''Opposites—React!'') * '' Beyond Mars'' (comic strip, 1952–1955)

Publication History

All the entries in the series were initially published in ''

Astounding Science Fiction ''Analog Science Fiction and Fact'' is an American science fiction magazine published under various titles since 1930. Originally titled ''Astounding Stories of Super-Science'', the first issue was dated January 1930, published by William C ...

'' magazine. The short story ''Collision Orbit'' was published in the July 1942 issue., 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 two preceding stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, released as ''Seetee Ship'' in

1951 Events January * January 4 – Korean War: Third Battle of Seoul – Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time (having lost the Second Battle of Seoul in September 1950). * January 9 – The Government of the United ...

by Gnome PressSeetee Ship
The Gnome Press Release. Retrieved 26 December 2017. in an edition of 4,000 copies, and had subsequent reprintings from several publishers, including an omnibus edition. (The first story in the series, "Collision Orbit," was not collected in either of the Gnome Press books, or in any later omnibus editions.)

Plot

Though ''Seetee Shock'' (

1949 Events January * January 1 – A United Nations-sponsored ceasefire brings an end to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. The war results in a stalemate and the division of Kashmir, which still continues as of 2022. * January 2 – Luis ...

) was the first part of the series to be published in book form, it is set at a later point than ''Seetee Ship''. In "Minus Sign," from which the first part of the book was adapted, spatial engineer Rick Drake continues his father's quest to tame seetee, but becomes entangled in the interplanetary politics of energy shortage. The second part of the book is adapted from the 1943 story "Opposites—React!" in which a contraterrene alien artifact is discovered, and competing parties race to reach it and learn its secrets. The book's plot differs somewhat from the magazine version, particularly in incorporating the speculation that time would run backwards in the neighborhood of a contraterrene object. The 1952 comic strip '' Beyond Mars'' was based on the Seetee series, with a very similar setting, characters, and technology base.

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. *.

References

Sources