![]() The more moderate Venusians and Jovians had invited Earth to join the post-war Mandate to counterbalance hard-line Martian influence, but the asterites - despite having fought on the rebel side in the hope of establishing their own independent High Space Union - were betrayed by their former allies at the conclusion of the war.Ĭollision Orbit, published in the July 1942 issue of Astounding, begins in early 2191 on the sleepy colonized asteroid Obania, which is suddenly endangered by a smaller asteroid after a random collision with a seetee body alters its orbit. 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 started by the Martian Reich, which saw all of Earth's colonies except the Moon gain independence. The four constituent powers of the Mandate are the Earth-Moon Union (which is apparently American-dominated), the Martian Reich, the Jovian Soviet, and an unnamed Chinese regime on Venus the Earth-based Interplanet conglomerate, which holds a century-old uranium monopoly, is a de-facto fifth power, and largely controls the government of Earth. They are currently governed by the High Space Mandate, a joint multilateral administration run for the benefit of - the major planets of the solar system. In the late 22nd century, many asteroids had been made habitable decades ago by "asterites" or Belt colonists through the use of paragravity technology. While directly based on the Seetee series, with a very similar setting, characters, and technology base, the 1952 comic strip Beyond Mars did not share the same continuity the strip's departures included Mars and Venus being home to intelligent alien races, and neither solar-system politics nor antimatter played major parts in the story. The stories' internal chronological order is identical to their order of publication, save for the 1951 fix-up Seetee Ship, which is set before Seetee Shock ( 1949), the first part of the series to be published in book form. (The first story in the series, "Collision Orbit," was not collected in either of the Gnome Press books, or in any later omnibus editions.) The second and third stories were subsequently combined into a fix-up novel, released as Seetee Ship in 1951 by Gnome Press in an edition of 4,000 copies, and had subsequent reprintings from several publishers, including a Lancer omnibus edition in 1972. 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 first three stories were published in an eight-month period straddling 19.
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