The ''Seetee'' series is a science fiction series by American writer

Jack Williamson John Stewart Williamson (April 29, 1908 – November 10, 2006), who wrote as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer, often called the "Dean of Science Fiction". He is also credited with one of the first uses of the term ''genet ...

(writing under the pseudonym "Will Stewart.") It consists of several books and stories set in the late 22nd century, amid space-dwelling

Asteroid Belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

miners who resist tyrannical central authority while harvesting the titular ''seetee'' (a phonetic for "CT" or "contraterrene" matter, an obsolete term for

antimatter In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radio ...

.) 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 A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest t ...

''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 A fix-up (or fixup) is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame ...

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 Uni ...

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 – ...

) 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 ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' 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 Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to mak ...

" 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 A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...

Richard Cathcart Richard Brook Cathcart (born 1943) is an American geographer who specializes in macro-engineering. See also * List of geographers External linksAbout 1943 births Living people American geographers Place of birth missing (living people) ...

successfully lobbied for formal recognition of the verb "to terraform." The word was added to the fourth edition of the

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary The ''Shorter Oxford English Dictionary'' (''SOED'') is an English language dictionary published by the Oxford University Press. The SOED is a two-volume abridgement of the twenty-volume ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED''). Print editions ...

in 1993. *.

References

Sources

*ISFDB listing
Seetee Ship
* * *{{cite web , last = Contento , first = William G , author-link = , title = Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections , work = , publisher = , url = http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/t88.htm#A1937 , format = , doi = , access-date = 2008-02-25 1951 short story collections Science fiction short story collections Fiction about asteroid mining Gnome Press books Science fiction short stories 1942 short stories