The Best of Mack Reynolds

by Mack Reynolds

Contents:
Down the River (1950)
Come In, Spaceport (1974)
Compounded Interest (1956)
The Business, as Usual (1952)
Freedom (1961)
Revolution (1960)
Burnt Toast (1955)
Your Soul Comes C.O.D. (1952)
Good Indian (1962)
No Return from Elba (1953)
Pacifist (1964)
Subversive (1962)
Earthlings Go Home! (1962)
Albatross (1955)
The Enemy Within (1967)
Survivor (1966)
Fad (1965)
Spaceman on a Spree (1963)
The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial (1965)
Utopian (1970)
Prone (1954)
Second Advent (1974)

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction

365 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer. His pen names included Clark Collins, Mark Mallory, Guy McCord, Dallas Ross and Maxine Reynolds. Many of his stories were published in "Galaxy Magazine" and "Worlds of If Magazine". He was quite popular in the 1960s, but most of his work subsequently went out of print.

He was an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party; his father, Verne Reynolds, was twice the SLP's Presidential candidate, in 1928 and 1932. Many of MR's stories use SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism' and most deal with economic issues in some way

Many of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, and many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted much that has come to pass, including pocket computers and a world-wide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.

Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.

Reviews

[iambehindu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mack Reynolds was a prolific and popular science fiction writer during his close to forty-year career. This edition, edited by Reynolds, was published by Pocket Books and contains an introduction by Barry Malzberg. It also features great artwork by the talented Ed Soyka.

Reynolds strikes me as an average yet competent writer. If you are looking for experimental new wave writing or idiosyncratic aesthetic treatment - you will not find it here. Reynolds lacks a distinctive voice; his novels may be different, but I'm addressing the short fiction here. Virtually all of these stories first appeared in pulps edited by the likes of Campbell and Boucher throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The pulps certainly produced important stories, but editors like Campbell had stylistic preferences that Reynolds catered to. As will become apparent in this review, Reynolds' stories have largely aged poorly. He was a writer with political motivations, and while some are of historical interest as artifacts or even ring true today, most propose no alternatives to debates that have long been exhausted. I imagine at the time it was different. My reviews are organized by the order in which I read them, which is never linear:

Compounded Interest - 1956 - (4/5) - Malzberg called this story "one of the most important and terrible (in the archaic sense) short stories ever published within science fiction." A strange man emerges at the dawn of human empires. He presents himself as an investor who desires to collect compound interest from a strange currency those in power have never seen. The conditions of the investment are that the currency remain unspent and that every century a descendant of the man will return to advise on how the profits should be allocated. Very clever indeed - a meditation on the circularity of power and its seemingly inevitable ability to corrupt and manifest wherever humans begin to exceed the population of a simple tribe. Reynolds' political ideas are strongest when they transcend a specific historical moment and do not rely on historical exactitudes.

Burnt Toast - 1955 - (3/5) - An effective and simple story told through the traditional Faustian lens. Many of Reynolds' stories rely on the "one-two punch" twist ending. Fairly predictable, but entertaining nonetheless. A man meets the devil in a hotel room. The devil presents him with a table of thirteen cocktails. One of the cocktails contains a poison that will end his life and cement his soul to hell. But with each cocktail that does not contain the poison, he will begin to accrue cash, starting at 100 dollars and compounding: 200, 400, and so on. A story that could be easily read and enjoyed if already a few cocktails deep, hold the poison.

Your Soul Comes C.O.D. - 1952 - (4/5) - Another Faustian tale, but with a twist that Reynolds "defies you to predict." He's right, caught me by surprise and reminded me a bit of an alteration on the biblical telling of Job. This one is only four pages but has a smile-inducing resolution.

Utopian - 1970 - (4/5) - In my estimation, this is the strongest story. Reynolds remarks that he aimed to turn this into a full novel, but I'm not sure if that ever happened. Anyway, as can be seen at this point, Reynolds' stories are highly reliant on the twist ending. This creates a kind of metafictional insertion that is stylistically risky because it can collapse the house entirely and bring unneeded awareness to the story. The twist here is not a simple "gotcha," however. A man wakes up in an alternate future where the efforts of his political revolution against the government of his age have been entirely successful. He is paraded around an apparent Utopia in complete disbelief but begins to question the nature of those who wanted to bring him here. The story effectively gestures toward the impossibility of Utopias - they cannot exist without difference. And I do mean that in the philosophical sense of differential relations. It is hard to imagine a pure state of anything without reversion to the mean, or yin and yang (no good without evil), or transformation into its opposite. Jung called this "enantiodromia": restoration of balance when something reaches a state of extremity.

Freedom - 1961 - (3/5) - An example where Reynolds' stories suffer simply by the passing of time. This could be filed away as "aged" or "outgrown" primarily because they are deeply concerned with outdated political issues and the conditions of the Soviet State. And since he is largely using science fiction as a mechanism for "alternate histories," they do feel a bit irrelevant due to the obvious fact that they are no longer hypotheticals. That does not mean that alternate histories are not effective, but then they need to be imaginative. Reynolds' stories are either imaginatively speculative or highly literal political commentary - the latter hasn't aged well. But it's not every day I encounter a science fiction story told from the perspective of the KGB. A very characteristic story by Reynolds.

The Enemy Within - 1967 - (2/5) - Even Reynolds admits this one is purely Campbell. It reminds me a lot of Kuttner and Moore. A young boy encounters a UFO near a field by his parent's cabin and is admitted entrance. The UFO is programmed to grant entrance to persons that have a particular set of emotive qualities and then defend the occupant from anyone exhibiting opposite qualities. When the boy's mother shows up attempting to rescue him, the spacecraft mistakes her maternal instincts as a threat. Derivative and vaguely interesting, but it served its purpose if the goal was simply to sell to magazines.

Pacifist - 1964 - (2/5) - Again, just a forgettable entry that is politically one-dimensional in its observation. Ask me about this in a few days and I will have forgotten the plot entirely. But being that this was 1964, it likely had more oomph during its time. A nice time capsule maybe, otherwise uninteresting.

Subversive - 1962 - (4/5) - Very clever story about the relation between capitalism and consumer markets that still rings true today. A mysterious company appears that begins selling products direct to consumer with no packaging and no marketing, door-to-door at wholesale manufacturing prices. It catches the attention of a corrupt capitalistic syndicate interested in maintaining the oppressive means of commerce. This one really leans into Reynolds' Marxist beliefs and is the stronger for it. In fact, Reynolds is strongest when he foregoes a complete historical outline and instead bothers with the actual socioeconomic perspectives he wants to impart. Even if one disagrees, they create a political knot that is fun to think about.

Revolution - 1960 - (2/5) - Another of Reynolds' political entries that harkens back to the Bolshevik uprisings. There are a few problems. If you contrast two opposing political systems, it's worthwhile to gesture at an alternative. Even if there is no answer, say that. Reynolds, despite being a socialist, seems to actually believe that nothing works. I'm not sure any of these stories actually pinpoint an identifiable belief of his other than that all political manifestations have been corruptible, which is not incorrect, but there is intellectual laziness in not proposing alternatives. Perhaps these are explored in his novels, so I'll extend some grace. Also, the random lady thrown into this as an object of desire for the protagonist, with no other function but to appease the love gun, c'mon Mack.

The Business, As Usual - 1952 - (2/5) - Four pages that do little else but induce a nice chuckle. Apparently this story was adapted for television in Belgium? A lonely GPU in OpenAI's warehouse could have scrambled an egg as I tasked ChatGPT with the quest of tracking it down. It sweated for about three minutes to no avail.

No Return From Elba - 1953 - (1/5) - A Don Quixote-like ruler known as "The Omnipotent" is subject to political espionage by his few remaining followers over the course of two pages that lead to an ending sentence that winks at you. This can be filed away as pulp drivel.

Second Advent - 1974 - (4/5) - Now this is exactly the kind of political contention that removes the outdated factor from Reynolds' stories. Like Utopia, this is a thoughtful and effective entry. An alien disguised as Christ visits the White House and informs the president that the world is governed by their species, who have been observing Earth, in varying degrees of interest, for millions of years. Interventions are now needed to prevent current leaders from destroying mankind. There is also a nice nod to the importance of Lincoln's presidency here. This leads me to believe that while socialism might have been the foundation of Reynolds' political beliefs, he was almost certainly a disillusioned one, perhaps prone to anarchist beliefs due to the failures of his ideological movements. When Reynolds' stories remove one tyrannical ruler, history just compensates, like Lenin replacing the Czar, but if all apex decision-makers are removed at once, the system is forced to reconfigure whether or not those outcomes are still the same old historical ostinato. I am in complete agreement with Reynolds here: regime change without ethical transformations just swaps masks.

Prone - 1954 - (?/?) - I was going to circle back to write something about this and then I forgot what it was about. So… there ya have it.

Good Indian - 1962 - (2/5) - Also just a sly smirk, vaguely clever. Perhaps now entirely useless except as a reminder of racial injustice.

At this point I closed up shop on Reynolds. If I had to suggest some selections, go with: Compounded Interest, Utopian, Subversive, Second Advent, and the Faust stories. Otherwise, Reynolds had his time but likely will not be remembered as particularly influential to the field.

[Shawn]

Read this for my work, minus three stories ("Freedom", "Revolution" and "Subversive").

As I've said before (but who knows who's reading a review when?) science-fiction isn't really my thing, personally, but I read some Ray Bradbury growing up and J.G. Ballard later in life. This made an interesting read immediately after The Third Eye collection of work by Theodore R. Cogswell because you could argue that both authors were basically writing for the same markets, but with Reynolds about a decade behind - as the sci-fi pulps began to mature and specialize. So there's a solid sampling of the same type of stuff from the Cogswell book - jokey, short and punchy sci-fi pulp shorts built around an idea, usually with a punchline - sometimes informed by Reynold's fondness for Charles Fort. But then, he also has later work that starts to delve more deeply into concepts (Reynolds was, notably, one of the few genre authors to incorporate an understanding of modern economics into his work), and is more interested in characters, political history and spirituality. Which, for some, will come across as didactic at times, but as modern short science fiction, from what I can tell, seems more focused nowadays on the personal and individual over the general and conceptual, that's probably inescapable.

As always, let's get the less interesting stuff out of the way first - although it should be said that Reynolds knows his writing basics and even the unappealing (to me) stories are well-written, tight and considered.

"Business As Usual" is one those presumably cute time-travel stories everyone was writing once upon a time - traveler from the past arrives in the future and gets conned into believing he has to take "proof" back with him. Eh. "Prone" is about a space army cadet whose accident prone nature exhibits at a near catastrophic (and telekinetic) level - so what do you do with him? "Your Soul Comes C.O.D." is another popular item of the time, the Faustian Bargain (which we'll see yet again before we're done), here playing cannily with language as a man makes a deal and then lives an honorable life for 40 years, only to wonder whether it will make a difference. Cute but slim. "Good Indian" is a strange little story, set in a future where all Native Americans have been assimilated, about what happens when representatives of the last 50 Seminole show up to bargain for a treaty - it's built around the supposed fact that the Seminoles have never signed a treaty with the U.S. - but for all that, ends on a joke most would now consider racist (although it isn't as if the representative of the white-man is shown in a positive light either). "No Return From Elba" is a near-flash piece about an alien dictator who modeled himself after Napoleon - and how he doesn't take defeat easily. Cute but, yup, thin. "The Enemy Within" is an odd little piece about an automated flying saucer, a lost boy and a mother determined to rescue him. Eh, again. "Down The River" has Earth's absentee landlords show up to apologize about the fact that they've had to transfer ownership... to another party that isn't as "hands off" as they were. A cute trifle with an obvious point, but daring in 1950. "Earthlings Go Home!", written as a parody piece for a travel magazine, throws together a bunch of fun goofy ideas into an essay on visiting Mars as a swinging bachelor, but still saves room for a short little barb at the end.

Reynolds, as I said, seemed to like using his short science-fiction to get in some solid social commentary of varying levels of complexity. Thus, in "Albatross", Earth shoots down the first alien craft to arrive, only to discover just a small part of an important message in the wreckage. "Second Advent" has Christ himself return, just to reveal the truth about Earth and its history to the President of the United States, and then make an odd request of him. "Utopian" has a 20th Century rebel leader unfrozen from cryogenic sleep in the future, only to find that everything he worked for has come to fruition, creating a utopian world with unforeseen problems. "Compounded Interest" is one of those logical time-travel stories that someone had to write, and Reynolds is to be commended for making the punchline as caustic as it is. "Pacifist" is also acidic, as a devoted member of an underground organization dedicated to removing war-mongers goes about his terrible business (which he loathes but finds inescapable) while philosophically jousting with a Professor about how to effect change in the world. "Burnt Toast" features another Faustian bargain - this one is slight when it comes right down to it but so well-written and conceived in its details that you can't help but like it (PLAYBOY magazine certainly did).

There are a few oddities here. A piece written for inclusion in a guide for school-age readers, "Come In, Spaceport", is a gripping narrative about a space-lifeboat and the desperate pleas of a teenage boy, hoping to rescue himself and his injured sister but unsure how to pilot the craft and operate the radio - it's very good, just slightly marred by a slight and unneeded twist ending. "Survivor" is a nicely done during-and-post apocalypse story about who in a big city chooses to survive, and how, and why. "The Adventure Of The Extraterrestrial" has an aged, doddering, possibly senile Sherlock Holmes and a grumpy and tired Dr. Watson hired to prove that aliens are living in London - sure, it's just more pastiche but I thought the depiction of Holmes (which must surely have rankled some purists) was interesting and especially enjoyed the deal he strikes at the climax.

The two stories I enjoyed most were "Spaceman On A Spree" and "Fad." The former features the same societal/economic projections of "Utopian" as a retiring space pilot, extremely happy to have left his work behind him, enjoys a last night on the town before settling down. But lack of motivation and ambition in the welfare state have made him the only candidate for continuing space-flights that *must* occur if mankind is to find a new challenging horizon and not stagnate. So a tired man must be conned... It's, perhaps, not as well-written as some other pieces here but very heart-felt.

"Fad" had me both laughing and shaking my head in sad awareness of just how pathetic our modern culture is. Reynolds, in 1965, was sharp enough to know that modern economics also meant creating demand for endless production, thus the codifying of the advertising, demographics and consumer research fields as economic staples of the United States, endlessly dedicated to getting us to buy useless crap we don't really need with money we don't have by convincing us how pathetic we are, the more to create a middle class of low-self-esteem consumers, or, as a traditional con-man would have it, a mark or a rube.

And so here we watch a conosortium of wealthy men plot and plan, with the help of psychological modeling and up-to-date research, to deliberately create a cultural fad for adults that will make thems millionaires. After some very pointed and truthful commentary on the whole "Dan'l Boone/Davey Crockett" fad of the 50s out of the way, the plan just needs to find a historical figure to exploit. But some figures resonate more than others...

"Fad" is cute sci-fi, which should make it disposable, but it's so on the money (It's basically the same point as ADBUSTERS magazine would make in the 1990s, just 30 years before the fact, identifying this shitty, reductive, culturally deadening, resource destroying social engineering we've all been subjected to by hyper-capitalists for 30 plus years at that time - 50 years, now - we just keep getting stupider and they just keep getting wealthier and more powerful) that I can't help but love it, even more so because Reynolds has chosen to make the prime motivator's of the scam two aging, traditional con-men with dialogue straight out of a Damon Runyon story (even though this is taking place in the "future"). Really fun stuff.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should reread this. Here's Alan Brown's fine review, at Tor.com:
https://www.tor.com/2018/04/26/spies-...

Very cool cover art, by Ed Soyka.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of shorts, most which have aged surprisingly well. Some have to be read as alternative histories since they now take place in our recent past. Still one of the best political SF writers.

[Mortimer Roxbrough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good read that you can pick up and put down at your leisure, as it contains short stories. Heartily recommended.