logbook: contraterrene matter

Image courtesy of the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library, Eastern New Mexico University

(Click image for larger version)

Image courtesy of the MIT Science Fiction Society. The illustration originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. Copyright (c) 1942 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell Magazines.

As the winter of 1941 began, Jack Williamson sat in a small unpainted cabin he had built on his family’s New Mexico ranch, pounding out a story on a secondhand Remington portable typewriter. The story, “Collision Orbit” appeared under the pen name Will Stewart in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in July 1942. It was among the first science fiction stories to explore contraterrene matter, today better known as antimatter.

The action takes place on an asteroid, where engineer Jim Drake sets out to harness the immense energy contained in contraterrene meteors—called CT or “seetee.” (In the 1940s, scientists had not yet ruled out the existence of meteors made of antimatter; see accompanying essay.) To avoid annihilation, Drake conceives a system of magnets that can capture antimatter without touching it.

“Terror to others, to him it was atomic energy, priceless and illimitable,” Williamson wrote on this page of his manuscript, a carbon copy whose cheap paper has browned with age.

Though later science fiction, such as Star Trek, often features antimatter, there are no clusters of it known in the real universe. The propulsion of spaceships by antimatter remains science fiction.
William S. Higgins, Fermilab

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