<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Mack Reynolds was the penname used by Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983), who started writing short stories in the 1950s but whose first SF novel would not appear until a decade later. Reynolds was somewhat anomalous in that he tended toward a socialist political philosophy in what was a predominantly conservative or libertarian dominated genre, particularly because he sold regularly to John W. Campbell Jr. His stories appeared regularly throughout the 1950s, many of them involving speculation about economics and government, but after 1960 Reynolds switched primarily to book length work, although in many cases his novels consisted of rewritten versions of related short stories.

His first SF novel in book form was The Earth War (1963, magazine title The Frigid Fracas), set in a future when corporations resolve their conflicts via gladiatorial contests and hired mercenaries. Joe Mauser, the recurring character in the series, had been introduced in a short story the previous year, which was later expanded into Mercenary from Tomorrow (1968). Mauser returned in two other novels. Reynolds wrote other loosely constructed series during the 1960s and 1970s, one of which involved the United Planets, predominantly espionage thrillers. The first title was Planetary Agent X (1965) and Reynolds added five more books to the series before abandoning it.

Two other cycles of stories were much more substantial. Rex Bader first appeared in The Five Way Secret Agent (1969), but the three sequels, particularly Chaos in Lagrangia (1984), are all much better. They were essentially Detective story crossovers, but setting them within an orbiting habitat gave them a distinctly different atmosphere. Another series concentrated on international politics and the economic development of Africa. It opened with Blackman's Burden and Border, Breed, Nor Birth, which were published in magazine form in the early 1960s but did not appear as books until 1972, bound together as an Ace double. A third, The Best Ye Breed, was added in 1978.

Although Reynolds continued to write entertaining, lightweight adventure stories during the 1970s, he interspersed them with more serious books, starting with Looking Backward from the Year 2000 (1973), a modernization of the Utopian novel by Edward Bellamy. Other books in the same vein followed, including The Towers of Utopia (1975) and After Utopia (1977). Several unfinished novels were completed by Dean Ing following Reynolds' death, of which the most interesting is Home Sweet Home 2010 AD (1984). Some of his earlier work was revised and expanded by Michael Banks during the 1980s.

Before his SF career really got started, Reynolds' had a non-fantastic novel published, [[The Case of the Little Green MenLP (1951), which was a murder mystery set at a science fiction convention, similar to Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue. He also co-edited an anthology, SF Carnival (1953) with Fredric Brown and is the author of a young adult Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius (1968).