The Seetee Books by Jack Williamson
Originally published 1949-1950
In the waning days of the 1940s the Science Fiction book market was picking up steam and publishers had quite a trove of material to draw from. Pulp magazines such as Astounding and Amazing had long been printing wonderful stories of various lengths–some of them longer works that were serialized over multiple issues. Most early SF books were reprints of these stories, targeted at a larger audience that had missed them the first time around. Anthologizers however, quickly strip-mined the field’s greatest hits. A massive (1000+ page) anthology called Adventures in Time & Space reprinted nearly all the short works that comprise the canon of the so-called Golden Age of SF. The editors were racing against several competing anthologies in the works and sent out their offers first to writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, snagging rights to their signature work. Anthologies continued to appear after this, as well as short story collections by individual authors, but what the book buying public really wanted were novels. Longer, serialized works of around 100-150 pages were polished off and fattened up. Sometimes a 20 or 30 page novelette would be “fixed-up”–expanded or padded out to fit the length requirements of the paperback novel market.
Another method was to take a series of interlinking magazine stories, stick them into a book (sometimes with newly written segue material,) and call them a novel. The most successful example of this is probably Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Jack Williamson’s Seetee Ship is not nearly as famous. It comprises several short stories about an anti-matter stuff called Seetee that were published throughout the 40s. They were transformed into a novel in 1951, after Williamson had written another book-length work on the subject called Seetee Shock. (The two works were reprinted in one volume by Jove in 1979.)
Williamson wrote the Seetee books under the pseudonym Will Stewart. Some massively productive authors used several noms-de-plume so that pulp magazine readers didn’t get sick of seeing their names in the table of contents month after month. Some authors used these other identities to publish stories that veered away from the type of writing they’d branded under their real (or primary) names. An SF writer might publish Fantasy stories or humorous pieces under another name so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans. The Seetee stories though are Hard SF and not wildly different from the stuff Jack Williamson published under his own name. Since his famous novel The Humanoids was written the same year (1949) as Seetee Shock, I imagine that over-production was the reason for the deployment of the Will Stewart name.
Williamson was older than many of the other Golden Age writers–over 40 when Seetee Shock was published–who were in some cases barely out of their teens when they did the writing they are remembered for. He’d been writing Space Operas before the dominant force of the Golden Age, John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, veered the entire field away from ray gun and bug-eyed monster tales and toward what became known as Hard SF–stories in which the future science utilized could be extrapolated from some plausible scientific theory. Authors of Hard SF were often more concerned with explaining a concept or playing with it than with draping an enjoyable or coherent plot structure around it. In magazine letters sections readers would rarely comment of the aesthetics of a story but rather would nitpick the science the author used. Williamson, however, was a talented storyteller and his tales are still enjoyable, even if the science in some of them is now outdated or implausible.
Seetee Ship concerns space mining, resource wars, and the struggle of independent contractors against the corporate colossus in the late 22nd century. The asteroid belt has been nearly mined out of useful minerals by the corporations of the nearby planets (the Earth, Mars, Jupiter) and the future of industry depends upon finding a new source of energy. Some believe that Seetee, a highly unstable anti-matter, is that source, but no safe way has yet been found to work with it. When Seetee comes into contact with actual matter it causes a massive radioactive explosion. This means that it is impossible to study closely or manipulate physically. This also makes it of interest to the bomb makers of the planets’ militaries.
Rich Drake, part of a clan of rock rats–unaffiliated miners often enslaved or imprisoned as “traitors” by corporations–is hired by the ominous Interplanet (a space age Dutch East India trading company) to find a way to work with Seetee. He fails. His father conducts independent research on his own asteroid called Freedonia (the same name as Groucho Marx’s absurdist realm in Duck Soup.) Upon the shards of a Seetee asteroid, the ruins of a civilization are found. Were they built by men or by Seetee life forms?
Such is the peril of the short story fix-up that Rich, hero the first half of the book, very nearly disappears in the second half. His rival Paul Anders, an Interplanet agent, is lured by a series of unlikely communications to a floating Seetee Ship. The ship contains the elusive “bedplate” that the Drakes and Interplanet have been trying to build–a fusion of Seetee and terrene matter that makes working with the hazardous space material possible. It turns out that the Seetee ship is hundreds of billions of years old, a warship from a long extinct race of Seetee beings. Contact with normal matter has propelled the ship backwards in time. Anders sees in the relics of this dead civilization the folly of using Seetee matter to create weapons, for it can only lead humanity to a similar extinction.
But since the bed plates are on the Seetee ship, the need to for humans to invent them is eliminated. They can be reverse engineered from the Seetee beings’ technology.
The sequel Seetee Shock opens with a bit of a shock. Most of the characters from the previous book are lying unconscious and dying of radiation exposure (Seetee Shock) upon the Freedonia asteroid, the victims of a saboteur who steals Seetee bombs in order to begin an interplanetary war. Nick Jenkins, a worker who joined the Drakes’ company after they began using the Seetee bedplates, is the only survivor–but he is also exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
With only about a week left to live he begins a desperate quest to repair the machinery on Freedonia and finish building a Seetee generator which will finally bring forth the Fifth Freedom–free energy which can be wirelessly tapped into. Since the Fifth Freedom would bankrupt energy producing firms such as Interplanet, and destroy their rule of the solar system, Jenkins runs into a lot of resistance. First from his famous uncle, Martin Brand, who wrote the original Fifth Freedom manifesto, but who is now a corrupt corporate schemer.
Seetee Shock gives us quite a bit of background about Williamson’s interesting future history though the ending is a bit rushed, with people running in and out of the triumphant and cured Jenkins’ hospital room telling him about evolutionary leaps and the social and industrial upheavals his Fifth Freedom is causing.
The Seetee saga promises us that our current state of affairs–wars over dwindling energy reserves,
corporate quashing of innovations or reforms that will threaten profits–will continue on far into the future.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Thanks for the interesting post. My inner pedant tells me you can say “is composed of” or “comprises” but not “is comprised of”.