Seetee Ship

The Seetee series is a golden age science fiction cycle by the American writer Jack Williamson (writing under the pseudonym "Will Stewart"). It follows late-22nd century Asteroid Belt colonists as they attempt to harness the titular seetee (a phonetic for "CT" or "contraterrene" matter, an obsolete term for antimatter) for the advancement of humanity and the defeat of the authoritarian the High Space Mandate.

All the series' individual entries were originally published as 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!")

Beyond Mars (comic strip, 1952–1955)

The first three stories were published in 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, released in book form by Simon & Schuster the following year. The second and third stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, Seetee Ship, released in 1951 by Gnome Press in an edition of 4,000 copies and subsequent reprinted by several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. (The first story in the series, "Collision Orbit," was not collected in either the Gnome or in any later omnibus edition.)

While directly based on the Seetee series, with the same physical setting, manque characters, and an identical technology base, the 1952 comic strip Beyond Mars did not share the books' continuity; its Mars and Venus were home to intelligent alien races, and neither solar-system politics nor the quest to harness antimatter played any part in its story.

In the late 22nd century, many asteroids had been made habitable decades ago by "asterites" or Belt colonists through the use of paragravity technology. They are currently governed by the High Space Mandate, a joint multilateral administration run by (and for the benefit of) the major inhabited planets of the solar system. The four constituent powers of the Mandate are the Earth-Moon Union (which is American-dominated), the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and an unnamed Chinese-dominated pan-Asian regime on Venus; the Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, which holds a century-old uranium monopoly, is a de-facto fifth power, and all-but controls the government of Earth.

The Mandate, whose capital is located on the asteroid Pallas, had been established in 2171 by the peace treaty concluding a nearly ten-year war between Earth and its colonies started by the Martian Reich, which saw the colonies except the Moon gain independence. After the war, the relatively moderate Venusians and Jovians had invited Earth to join the Mandate to counterbalance hard-line Martian influence, but the asterites - despite having fought on the winning side, in the hopes of establishing their own independent High Space Union - were betrayed by their former allies and reduced to a colonial status.