Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds (November 11, 1917 – January 30, 1983) 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 Star Trek. The book, Mission to Horatius (1968), 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 (SLP) so that from an early age Reynolds was raised to accept the tenets of Marxism and socialism. ("I was born into a Marxian Socialist family. I am the child who, at the age of five or six, said to his parent, 'Mother, who is Comrade Jesus Christ?' —for I had never met anyone in that household who wasn't called Comrade.") In 1935, while still in high school in Kingston, New York, Reynolds joined the SLP and became an active advocate of the party's goals. The following year, he toured the country with his father giving lectures and speeches, and became recognized as a significant force in advocating the SLP. In 1946, he made his first fiction sale, "What is Courage?", to Esquire magazine. A year later, he met a woman who shared his radical politics, Helen Jeanette Wooley. They were married in September 1947, and Jeanette agreed to support Reynolds for two years while he pursued a career as a writer for the detective pulps. After searching for a place with a low cost of living, they moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Reynolds met science fiction writers Walt Sheldon and Fredric Brown. Brown, later one of Reynolds' frequent collaborators, convinced Reynolds to shift from writing detective stories to writing science fiction. Reynolds' first sale of a science fiction story, "Last Warning" (also known as "The Galactic Ghost"), 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. 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. From 1961 to 1964, 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. 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. 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. 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".
Trouble in Utopia
Reynolds has been called a "cautious," "critical," 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.