Mack Reynolds


Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Dallas Ross, Mark Mallory, Clark Collins, Dallas Rose, Guy McCord, Maxine Reynolds, Bob Belmont, and Todd Harding. His work focused on socioeconomic speculation, usually expressed in thought-provoking explorations of utopian societies from a radical, sometime satiric perspective. He was a popular author from the 1950s to the 1970s, especially with readers of science fiction and fantasy magazines.
Reynolds was the first author to write an original novel based upon the 1966-1969 NBC television series . The book, Mission to Horatius, was aimed at young readers.

Biography

Reynolds was born in Corcoran, California, the second of four children of Verne La Rue Reynolds and Pauline McCord. When the family moved to Baltimore in 1918, his father joined the Socialist Labor Party so that from an early age Reynolds was raised to accept the tenets of Marxism and socialism., sold to Planet Stories in June 1949 but was not printed until 1954. His first published science fiction story, "Isolationist" appeared in Fantastic Adventures in June 1950. His career soon took off, resulting in a sale of 18 stories in 1950 alone. In 1951, he published his first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men, a mix of the murder-mystery and science fiction genres that became "an instant classic of science-fiction-fan related fiction."
In 1953, the Reynolds moved to San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico, where they lived for only eighteen months before embarking on a journey through Europe and the East that lasted almost ten years and included stays in Greece, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Eastern Europe, Finland, India, Japan, and Hong Kong. In 1955, Reynolds became a correspondent for Rogue magazine and began making money writing about his travels as well as from his science fiction stories, whose socioeconomic speculations now reflected the insights gained from his encounters with other cultures. In 1958, he became a choice writer for John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction, remaining its "most prolific contributor" for the next ten years. The same year, the publication of How to Retire without Money, to which Reynolds contributed under the byline Bob Belmont, led the National Executive Committee of the SLP to charge Reynolds with "supporting the fraudulent claims of capitalist apologists, viz, that capitalism offers countless opportunities to those who are 'alert'" and caused Reynolds to resign his membership from the SLP.
The 1960s saw some of Reynolds' best work, including the short stories "Revolution," "Combat," "Freedom," "Subversive," and "Mercenary", the Homer Crawford serials "Black Man's Burden" and "Border, Breed nor Birth," and the novellas "Adaptation," "Ultima Thule", and "Status Quo". In 1963, he published The Expatriates, a mix of travel memories and autobiographical material emphasizing the benefits of living outside the United States. From 1961-64, Reynolds, at the request of his agent, wrote five sex novels: Episode on the Riviera, A Kiss before Loving, This Time We Love, The Kept Woman, and The Jet Set.
In 1965, the Reynolds returned to San Miguel de Allende to live. Their house on Nuñez 32 soon became a familiar haunt of the artistic community, often frequented by renowned authors. While Reynolds continued to write and sell science fiction stories, by 1969 his sales began to decline and several of his novels were held back during a takeover of Ace Books in 1970 and not published until 1975. During this difficult period of his life, Reynolds wrote two romance novels, The House in the Kasbah and The Home of the Inquisitor, under the byline Maxine Reynolds. He also began his most ambitious undertaking, a series of stories envisioning life in the year 2000. Looking Backward from the Year 2000 and Equality: In the Year 2000 updated and critiqued the socialist utopias created by Edward Bellamy in ' and Equality, which had helped shape Reynolds' radical worldview at an early age. Commune 2000 A.D., The Towers of Utopia, and Rolltown and the Lagrangia series explored marginal utopian colonies on earth and in space, respectively. In 1976, the short story collection The Best of Mack Reynolds was published.
By the end of the 1970s, Reynolds was having trouble getting his manuscripts published. One month before his death in 1983, as he was recuperating from cancer surgery, his new agent negotiated a contract with Tor Books. By 1986, eleven of his books had been published posthumously, five of them revised and co-authored by Dean Ing, and two more by Michael A. Banks. The New England Science Fiction Association, which had invited Reynolds to be its Guest of Honor at Boskone XX, published the collection Compounded Interests to be released as part of his appearance, but Reynolds died three weeks before the convention. In it, Reynolds identifies his ' novel Mission to Horatius as his "bestseller."

Major themes

While Reynolds' fiction spans an array of science fiction elements including time travel, alien visitation, world computers, Amazonian cultures, and intergalactic spy adventures, his radical interrogation of socioeconomic systems sets him apart from other science fiction writers. Accordingly, many of Reynolds' original contributions to science fiction exist in the form of sociological predictions, some of which have come to pass: the credit-card economy, a worldwide computer network with information available at one's fingertips, a "Common Europe," a basic guaranteed income for every citizen, mobile cities, or global societies with a universal religion and an Esperanto-based common language.

Alternative socio-economic systems

Reynolds sought to shake his readers' complacent acceptance of Cold War capitalism by depicting a variety of post-capitalist near futures, many of which he envisioned could occur around the year 2000. His stories, therefore, cover an assortment of social systems including anarchy, communism, technocracy, syndicalism, meritocracy, various forms of socialism, and an extrapolation of free-enterprise economics, People's Capitalism. In addition, some of his stories set up a rivalry between a collective and a competitive economy in order to assess their respective merits, sometimes coming to the conclusion that they cannot be compared except for their imperialistic aims, as in the novella "Adaptation," while at other times both systems are revealed to be equally decadent and stagnant, as in the Joe Mauser story "Frigid Fracas." Reynolds' novella "Radical Center" – portraying radical centrism as a conspiracy of the powerful to render ordinary citizens non-judgmental and apathetic – became the lead story in a university textbook, American Government Through Science Fiction.

Trouble in Utopia

Reynolds has been called a "cautious," "critical," or "ambiguous" Utopian writer because his many explorations of ideal societies, such as his updates of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Equality, focus as much on Utopia's dilemmas as on its benefits. Typically, Reynolds' Utopias are worlds of almost complete industrial automation so that no one needs to work, everyone lives in security thanks to a guaranteed basic income, and those who volunteer for the few jobs left are chosen via a quantitative ability test. At the same time, the population's very life of leisure has led to species stasis by discouraging the continual striving that gives humanity its purpose as in the story "Utopian," or the Utopian welfare state has metamorphosed into a caste society where those in power aim to keep it, blocking for its other members the opportunity to exert themselves to the full extent of their abilities, as in the Joe Mauser series.

The continuous revolution

Reynolds' heroes usually seek to improve their societies by direct revolutionary action. Sometimes their revolution is meant to advance a people's level of civilization, as in the case of the North Africa series; sometimes it aims to upset a Utopian society where, while there is no want, inequality, or conflict, there is also no sense of purpose, as in the novel After Utopia, or possibility of social mobility, as in the Joe Mauser series. Usually, once a revolution has succeeded in subverting the status quo, another revolution follows and subverts it, as in the story "Black Sheep Astray," giving the impression that social change is as endless as it is progressive.

Short fiction

1950s

1950s