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 PressSeetee Ship, The Gnome Press Release. Retrieved 26 December 2017. 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.
Plot "Collision Orbit" begins in early 2191 on the sleepy 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 (the daughter of Obania's founder) 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, with the resultant matter-antimatter reaction functioning as an improvised rocket and propelling 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, coolly-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.William S. Higgins, "The Road to Seetee", in Jack Williamson, Opposites—React!, Haffner Press, 2010, p. 23-24
"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.