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 inGalaxy Magazine and Worlds of If Magazine. He was quite popular in the 1960s, but most of his work subsequently went out of print.
Reynolds was born in Corcoran, California, the eldest of three children of Verne and Pauline Reynolds; his father was the Socialist Labor Party's Vice-Presidential candidate in 1924, and its Presidential candidate on two occasions, in 1928 and 1932, and his son was in turn an active supporter of the SLP, many of his stories using SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism', and most dealing in some way with economic issues.
In 1935, while still in high school, Reynolds joined the Socialist Labor Party 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.
After graduating from high school in Kingston, New York, Reynolds worked on various newspapers in the area, progressing from reporter to editor, from 1936 to the early 1940s, in 1943 becoming a supervisor for IBM. He married Evelyn Sandell in 1937, with whom he had three children, Emil, LaVerne, and Dallas Jr. LaVerne is the only relative who remains publically listed today. She lives in Weaverville, CA with her daughter Desiree Brown and her 12 grandchildren. Other surviving relatives live in Redding, CA and Sacramento, CA.
From 1940 to 1943 Reynolds and his father toured the US as the chief team of spokesmen for the SLP. In 1944, feeling that it was his duty, Reynolds joined the US Army Transportation Corps and was stationed in the Philippines as a ship's navigator.
When he left the service and returned home, Reynolds divorced Evelyn. His first fiction sale was in 1946, to Esquire magazine. In September 1947 he remarried, to Helen Jeanette Wooley, and two years later they moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Fredric Brown, his frequent collaborator, convinced Reynolds to try his hand at writing science fiction. His first sale of a science fiction story was "The Galactic Ghost", sold to Planet Stories in 1949, although not printed until 1954. His career soon took off, resulting in a sale of 17 stories in 1950 alone.
Reynolds made his home primarily in San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico, from the early 1950s to his death in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. In the 1950s, he worked as the travel editor for men's magazine Rogue and traveled all over the world, visiting and living for periods in such places as Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Eastern Europe, Gibraltar, and North Africa.
Several of his last books are credited as co-authored with Dean Ing. When Reynolds knew he had a brief time to live, he tried to write enough to provide an income for his wife after his death. To this end, he wrote as many novel outlines as he could, with the arrangement that Ing would finish them.
Most of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted many things which have come to pass, including pocket computers and a worldwide 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.
Reynolds was also 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. In 1972, he used the name 'Maxine Reynolds' on two romantic suspense novels, House in the Kasbah and Home of the Inquisitor.
