Publication history
The series' constituents were originally published as seven 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!")
The first three stories were published in rapid succession between late 1942 and early 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 and released in book form by Simon & Schuster the following year. [1] The second and third stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, Seetee Ship, released in 1951 by Gnome Press [2] in an edition of 4,000 copies and subsequent reprinted by several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. (The first story, "Collision Orbit," was not 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.
Setting
In the late 22nd century, the Asteroid Belt is inhabited by human colonists known as "asterites," having been made habitable decades ago through the use of "paragravity" technology. The asteroids nonetheless remain a dangerous environment due to the "contraterrene drift," a scattering of antimatter ranging from dust to sizeable asteroids, comprising twelve percent of the mass of the Belt. They represent the aftermath of an ancient collision between the "Invader," a Mars-sized rogue planet made of antimatter, and "Adonis," a slightly-larger conventional-matter world that had once orbited between Mars and Jupiter.
The asterites are governed by the High Space Mandate, a multilateral administration run by the major powers of the Solar System: the (American-dominated) Earth-Moon Union, the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and the pan-Asian (but Chinese-dominated) Venus Empire. The Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, which holds a century-old monopoly on uranium, is a silent fifth partner, and all-but-controls the Earth-Moon Union as well.
The Mandate, headquartered on the asteroid Pallas, had been established in 2171 at the conclusion of a decade-long war between Earth and its colonies, in which all but the Moon gained independence. After the war, the asterites - despite having fought on the colonial side in the hope of declaring an independent High Space Union - were betrayed by their former allies and reduced to a protectorate of the Mandate, which the relatively moderate Venusians and Jovians had permitted Earth to join 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, cooly-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. [3]
"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.
Seetee Shock begins about two years later. Drake, McGee and Drake has been driven into bankruptcy by Mandate lawfare, but Martin Brand, a celebrity spatial engineer and former acquaintance of Jim Drake, has salvaged the firm and renamed it "Seetee Inc." His nephew, the young Nicol Jenkins, has come from Earth to work for him on Freedonia, though he is plagued with anxiety in the hostile environment. Recalled to Freedonia from a solo trip to collect antimatter, he finds the asteroid's complement has been gassed unconscious, and someone has stolen its recently-manufactured stock of antimatter-warhead missiles. While Jenkins is investigating the theft, one of the missiles is fired against Freedonia, not killing anyone directly but lethally irradiating everyone present, including Anders, McGee, and both Drakes. Jenkins transports his unconscious comrades to Obania, where a doctor gives them all a week to live. He resolves to use the week to complete Freedonia's great project, an antimatter-powered broadcast energy station that would usher in a post-scarcity era and decrease tensions among the uranium-dependent great powers. To that end, he hurries to Pallas, the Mandate capital, where his uncle Martin Brand heads Seetee Inc.'s main office.
An asteroid is a minor planet—an object that is neither a true planet nor a comet—that orbits within the inner Solar System. They are rocky, metallic, or icy bodies with no atmosphere. The size and shape of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from small rubble piles under a kilometer across to Ceres, a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter.
Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories by American writer Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece, was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection.
The Rolling Stones is a 1952 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein.
The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.
An overwhelming majority of fiction is set on or features the Earth, as the only planet home to humans. This also holds true of science fiction, despite perceptions to the contrary. Works that focus specifically on Earth may do so holistically, treating the planet as one semi-biological entity. Counterfactual depictions of the shape of the Earth, be it flat or hollow, are occasionally featured. A personified, living Earth appears in a handful of works. In works set in the far future, Earth can be a center of space-faring human civilization, or just one of many inhabited planets of a galactic empire, and sometimes destroyed by ecological disaster or nuclear war or otherwise forgotten or lost.
John Stewart Williamson, who wrote as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer, one of several called the "Dean of Science Fiction". He is also credited with one of the first uses of the term genetic engineering. Early in his career he sometimes used the pseudonyms Will Stewart and Nils O. Sonderlund.
Xenoarchaeology, a branch of xenology dealing with extraterrestrial cultures, is a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in works of science fiction. The field is concerned with the study of the material remains to reconstruct and interpret past life-ways of alien civilizations. Xenoarchaeology is not currently practiced by mainstream archaeologists due to the current lack of any material for the discipline to study.
Jovian Chronicles is a science fiction game setting published by Dream Pod 9 since 1997. It introduces a complete universe for role-playing and wargaming space combat featuring mecha, giant spacecraft, and epic space battles.
Beyond Mars was a science fiction comic strip written by Jack Williamson and drawn by Lee Elias. The Sunday strip ran in the New York Daily News from February 17, 1952, to March 13, 1955, initially as a full tabloid page and, near the end, as a half tab. It is set in the same universe as the Williamson novels Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock.
Terraforming is well represented in contemporary literature, usually in the form of science fiction, as well as in popular culture. While many stories involving interstellar travel feature planets already suited to habitation by humans and supporting their own indigenous life, some authors prefer to address the unlikeliness of such a concept by instead detailing the means by which humans have converted inhospitable worlds to ones capable of supporting life through artificial means.
Asteroids have appeared in fiction since the late 1800s, the first one—Ceres—having been discovered in 1801.
The terraforming of Mars or the terraformation of Mars is a hypothetical procedure that would consist of a planetary engineering project or concurrent projects aspiring to transform Mars from a planet hostile to terrestrial life to one that could sustainably host humans and other lifeforms free of protection or mediation. The process would involve the modification of the planet's extant climate, atmosphere, and surface through a variety of resource-intensive initiatives, as well as the installation of a novel ecological system or systems.
The fictional portrayal of the Solar System has often included planets, moons, and other celestial objects which do not actually exist in reality. Some of these objects were, at one time, seriously considered as hypothetical planets which were either thought to have been observed, or were hypothesized to be orbiting the Sun in order to explain certain celestial phenomena. Often such objects continued to be used in literature long after the hypotheses upon which they were based had been abandoned.
In astronomy, a trojan is a small celestial body (mostly asteroids) that shares the orbit of a larger body, remaining in a stable orbit approximately 60° ahead of or behind the main body near one of its Lagrangian points L4 and L5. Trojans can share the orbits of planets or of large moons.
Wheelers is a hard science fiction novel written by English mathematician Ian Stewart and reproductive biologist Jack Cohen. The book was originally released in hardcover form in the year 2000, and a more common paperback printing was begun in 2001. It has enjoyed modest commercial success and is perhaps best known for its conceptions of alien zoology and intelligence—hallmarks of Cohen's work as a consultant on exobiology for books, movies, and television.
Rocket Jockey is a juvenile science fiction novel by Philip St. John with cover illustration by Alex Schomburg. The story follows the heroic efforts of young man Jerry Blaine in his efforts to win the famous rocket race, the Armstrong Classic. Rocket Jockey is a part of the Winston Science Fiction set, a series of juvenile novels which have become famous for their influence on young science fiction readers and their exceptional cover illustrations by award-winning artists.
7604 Kridsadaporn, provisional designation 1995 QY2, is an unusual, carbonaceous asteroid and Mars-crosser on a highly eccentric orbit from the outer regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) in diameter. It was discovered on 31 August 1995, by Australian astronomer Robert McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, Australia. Due to its particular orbit, the C-type asteroid belongs to MPC's list of "other" unusual objects, and has been classified as an "asteroid in cometary orbit", or ACO. The asteroid was named in memory of Thai astronomer Kridsadaporn Ritsmitchai.
Comets have appeared in works of fiction since at least the 1830s. They primarily appear in science fiction as literal objects, but also make occasional symbolical appearances in other genres. In keeping with their traditional cultural associations as omens, they often threaten destruction to Earth. This commonly comes in the form of looming impact events, and occasionally through more novel means such as affecting Earth's atmosphere in different ways. In other stories, humans seek out and visit comets for purposes of research or resource extraction. Comets are inhabited by various forms of life ranging from microbes to vampires in different depictions, and are themselves living beings in some stories.
"Brake" is a science fiction short story by American writer Poul Anderson, first published in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections Beyond the Beyond (1969) and The Psychotechnic League (1981). As a component of the Psychotechnic League future history / alternate history, "Brake" takes place in 2270, as the civilization built up in the aftermath of the 1958 Third World War is being torn between mutually antagonistic factions, on the verge of collapsing into "the day of genocide and the night of ignorance and tyranny".
The Massacre of Mankind (2017) is a science fiction novel by the British writer Stephen Baxter, a sequel to H. G. Wells' 1898 classic The War of the Worlds, authorised by the Wells estate. It is set in 1920, 13 years after the events of the original novel, as a second Martian invasion is chronicled by Miss Elphinstone, the ex-sister-in-law of the narrator of War of the Worlds. Baxter also wrote an authorised sequel to Wells' novel The Time Machine, called The Time Ships.
