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 1961–64, 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. 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
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 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 (February 1983), 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
Star Trek novel
Mission to Horatius as his "bestseller." ==Major themes==