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Seetee #2
Seetee Shock
Nick Jenkins works with a group of engineers on asteroid Freedonia, attempting to build the first CT reactor. A contraterrene matter (CT, or antimatter) reactor will provide enough power for the entire solar system, freeing people from the tyranny of limited fission power monopoly controlled by the Interplanet corporation. A surprise attack on Freedonia by unknown attackers results disables the entire staff save for Nick Jenkins. The entire staff, including Jenkins, is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. They will all die within two weeks. Now it up to Nick Jenkins to track down the attackers, prevent the outbreak of a CT war, and finish the CT reactor in order to provide free power to the solar system. And he must do so before he dies of radiation sickness.
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First published January 1, 1968
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About the author
Jack Williamson
542 books167 followersJohn Stewart Williamson who wrote as Jack Williamson (and occasionally under the pseudonym Will Stewart) was a U.S. writer often referred to as the "Dean of Science Fiction".
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 1, 2019
More of a rewrite than a sequel.. Williamson mainly explores the social and political ramifications of his proposed 'fifth freedom' (unlimited free power). To do so, he goes back before the beginning of the first book to more specifically set up how his world came to be, and then does go past to a new conclusion.. skipping the event of the first book over as if they weren't really important.
This one focuses on Nick Jenkins only, and his female foil/love interest.. the others are just bit players. , and his uncle the former idealist turned robber baron. There was plenty of pretend science to go around, but the story and its implications (from 1950) were clearly meant to be applied for the considering of the budding nuclear power industry (which, in this story, had been tapped out). While not particularly unique or inciteful, this is just the kind of old sci fi I appreciate, using a possible future to make people consider the present.
Alot of those points are a bit dated (then don't even consider solar power, for example) but the talking points can certainly be applied and considered today. The down side is the plot isn't very interesting, it's very basic, and has an ending that one can see coming on page 10.
This one focuses on Nick Jenkins only, and his female foil/love interest.. the others are just bit players. , and his uncle the former idealist turned robber baron. There was plenty of pretend science to go around, but the story and its implications (from 1950) were clearly meant to be applied for the considering of the budding nuclear power industry (which, in this story, had been tapped out). While not particularly unique or inciteful, this is just the kind of old sci fi I appreciate, using a possible future to make people consider the present.
Alot of those points are a bit dated (then don't even consider solar power, for example) but the talking points can certainly be applied and considered today. The down side is the plot isn't very interesting, it's very basic, and has an ending that one can see coming on page 10.
November 15, 2009
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.
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 21, 2023
When an unknown assailant attacks the solar system’s only antimatter factory in the asteroid belt, spatial engineer Nick Jenkins is the only one not left hospitalised. However, as the asteroid is struck by a missile, he receives a lethal dose of radiation from the antimatter – or seetee – explosion, and upon returning to civilisation, is given two weeks to live. Determined to find out who is behind the raid – in which the world’s only stockpile of antimatter weapons were stolen – he visits his uncle – an engineer and the world’s foremost businessman – for help. Meanwhile, interplanetary war looms, as the factions formed in WWII (US-led Earth, Soviet Jupiter, Martian Nazis and Chinese Venus) all try to use the situation to gain control of the only man (alive?) capable of producing seetee weapons – Nick Jenkins. However, the idealistic Jenkins desperately tries to find the resources to start his uncle’s former pipe dream, the Brand Generator, which would be capable of providing the entire solar system with free energy – in hopes that this would bring world peace.
Jack Williamson is a giant in SF literature, although “Seetee Shock” is not his best work. A continuation of two previous short stories, it forms the middle part of his Seetee series.
Seetee is derived from CT or “contraterrene” matter, an old term for antimatter. The series works under the assumption that antimatter is just like matter, only “inverted”, and can be used to build stuff with.
The novel has a good story hidden under its junk, as Williamson explores the ideological and political impact of the nuclear race under the metaphor of “seetee”. However, way too much of the book is spent recapping the previous two stories and the political and technical history of seetee, which are laid out by the characters in endless, dry monologues, and the ending is anti-climactic, as the the story’s final twists are relayed to Jenkins second-hand by visitors by his hospital bed.
The “Seetee” series is mostly famous for inventing the word “terraforming”.
Jack Williamson is a giant in SF literature, although “Seetee Shock” is not his best work. A continuation of two previous short stories, it forms the middle part of his Seetee series.
Seetee is derived from CT or “contraterrene” matter, an old term for antimatter. The series works under the assumption that antimatter is just like matter, only “inverted”, and can be used to build stuff with.
The novel has a good story hidden under its junk, as Williamson explores the ideological and political impact of the nuclear race under the metaphor of “seetee”. However, way too much of the book is spent recapping the previous two stories and the political and technical history of seetee, which are laid out by the characters in endless, dry monologues, and the ending is anti-climactic, as the the story’s final twists are relayed to Jenkins second-hand by visitors by his hospital bed.
The “Seetee” series is mostly famous for inventing the word “terraforming”.
May 7, 2022
Rather uneven. Still fascinating how it deals with the possibility of antimatter energy at a time when nuclear bombs had just been invented and nuclear power was not yet in operation. Written in the late 40s, it's obviously not getting much modern technology right, but that is interesting in itself. All in all, feels old in many ways. Has a short story character to it. In the hands of modern sci-fi authors, this could have been a very interesting story.
April 27, 2021
Has not aged well.
It is from 1949, after all.
It is from 1949, after all.
May 16, 2014
‘Nick Jenkins mines volatile Seetee in the wastes of space – until interstellar intrigue threatens havoc. faced with his own certain death – and even crueller betrayal by the woman he loves – he has but one week left to save the solar system from total destruction.’
Blurb from the 1979 Jove omnibus paperback edition.
This rather disappointing sequel to ‘Seetee Ship’ introduces Nick Jenkins, a Seetee engineer on Freedonia, the asteroid base where Jim Drake has discovered how to work Contraterrene (CT) material or antimatter. Drake is on the verge of switching on a generator, powered by Seetee which will provide free unlimited power to the rest of the Solar System. However, while Jenkins is out in space collecting more Seetee, a traitor drugs the unsuspecting miners, steals a cache of Seetee weapons, and tries to blow up the plant.
Jenkins manages to rescue the comatose men, but he and they have received lethal doses of radiation. Jenkins is given only a week to live, in which time he must convince a woman that he is on the side of right, return to Freedonia and start the generator. Interplanet (the evil ‘Company’ which holds a monopoly on nuclear based power) does not want the generator started and so the race is on.
It is not clear why Williamson chose not to use any characters from the previous book. Rich Drake and Nick Jenkins are interchangeable cardboard heroes and Williamson could also have gotten far more mileage out of McGee, the strange asterite with an uncanny ability for space navigation.
McGee is discussed several times. Indeed, it seems that McGee is the first evidence of asterites evolving into humans suited for living in space. McGee also proves to be immune to radiation and thus provides a serum derived from his blood which finally manages to cure Jenkins and the other dying men from Freedonia. And yet McGee never appears in person. It may be that there were copyright problems with regard to using some characters from the previously serialised stories, but one would presume that would also apply to the locations and to ‘Seetee’ itself.
It’s an odd anti-capitalistic novel which at some points is bogged down with entire chapters of info-dumped backstory.
Nick Jenkins worships his uncle, Martin Brand, who – apart from being the author of a kind of socialist manifesto about the political destiny of the power industry – is pretty obviously the main villain in the piece. He is also the main perpetrator of ‘backstory lectures’ and one feels that, worshipped though he may be, someone should really have told him to shut up. (See also Giles Habibula in ‘Legion of Space’ for another over-verbose Williamson character)
Brand is also the archetype of the ‘good man who went to the Dark Side’ but manages to redeem himself in the rushed finale.
Blurb from the 1979 Jove omnibus paperback edition.
This rather disappointing sequel to ‘Seetee Ship’ introduces Nick Jenkins, a Seetee engineer on Freedonia, the asteroid base where Jim Drake has discovered how to work Contraterrene (CT) material or antimatter. Drake is on the verge of switching on a generator, powered by Seetee which will provide free unlimited power to the rest of the Solar System. However, while Jenkins is out in space collecting more Seetee, a traitor drugs the unsuspecting miners, steals a cache of Seetee weapons, and tries to blow up the plant.
Jenkins manages to rescue the comatose men, but he and they have received lethal doses of radiation. Jenkins is given only a week to live, in which time he must convince a woman that he is on the side of right, return to Freedonia and start the generator. Interplanet (the evil ‘Company’ which holds a monopoly on nuclear based power) does not want the generator started and so the race is on.
It is not clear why Williamson chose not to use any characters from the previous book. Rich Drake and Nick Jenkins are interchangeable cardboard heroes and Williamson could also have gotten far more mileage out of McGee, the strange asterite with an uncanny ability for space navigation.
McGee is discussed several times. Indeed, it seems that McGee is the first evidence of asterites evolving into humans suited for living in space. McGee also proves to be immune to radiation and thus provides a serum derived from his blood which finally manages to cure Jenkins and the other dying men from Freedonia. And yet McGee never appears in person. It may be that there were copyright problems with regard to using some characters from the previously serialised stories, but one would presume that would also apply to the locations and to ‘Seetee’ itself.
It’s an odd anti-capitalistic novel which at some points is bogged down with entire chapters of info-dumped backstory.
Nick Jenkins worships his uncle, Martin Brand, who – apart from being the author of a kind of socialist manifesto about the political destiny of the power industry – is pretty obviously the main villain in the piece. He is also the main perpetrator of ‘backstory lectures’ and one feels that, worshipped though he may be, someone should really have told him to shut up. (See also Giles Habibula in ‘Legion of Space’ for another over-verbose Williamson character)
Brand is also the archetype of the ‘good man who went to the Dark Side’ but manages to redeem himself in the rushed finale.
November 21, 2014
The 1968 edition of a novel first published in 1949-1950 by Jack Williamson writing under the name of Will Stewart as a sequel to Seetee Ship. The story is set around asteroid miners seeking anti-matter. The science content, involving as it does the new (to 1949) world of atomic energy, seems seriously flawed even by the standards of what was known in the public domain at that time, which is a pity because science-based SF usually scores by making the futuristic science believable enough to suspend disbelief. Still, asteroid mining was a staple of 1940s and 1950s pulp SF and I enjoyed it for that reason, because nobody would write stuff like this anymore. An undemanding SF pot-boiler, and a good representation of pulp SF of it’s time.
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