![]() When Ronny Bronston manages to land a job at Section G of the Bureau of Investigation he is told that it is a cloak and dagger department, whose role is to upholding articles one and two of the United Planets Charter, which forbid United Planets and its member planets from interfering in each others' political, socioeconomic and religious institutions. The thing now was to pull off this assignment and cinch the appointment for good. Possibly one hundredth of the population at one time or another, and for varying lengths of time, managed it. Lucky was the Earthling able to find service in interplanetary affairs, in any of the thousands of tasks that involved journey between member planets of UP. New colonies drew their immigrants from older ones. Few there were, any more, allowed to emigrate from Earth. She couldn't afford to let her best seed depart. Earth became a clearing house for a thousand cultures, attempting, with only moderate success, to co-ordinate her widely spreading children. But someone had to stay to administer the ever more complicated racial destiny. It took absolute severity by Earth authorities to prevent the depopulation of the planet. It was the ambition of every youth to join the snowballing avalanche of man into the neighboring stars. Man's destiny lay out in the stars, only a laggard stayed home of his own accord. There was a racial enthusiasm about it all. Mankind was exploding through this spiral arm of the galaxy. It's available free from Project Gutenberg and Librivox. There's also something about it that gives the story an older feel to it. The writing style is decent, but not great. ![]() It's an interesting view of interstellar civilization. However, the only outsiders that have been permitted on the planet have been United Planets employees - and none of them fit the profile for Paine.Īs Ronnie continues his search on other planets, he begins to come to new conclusions. The assassin used a bomb that could not have been made on that planet. The case is somewhat analogous to a locked-door mystery. Their first stop is a planet with a theocracy where the leader has just been assassinated. He is given an assistant who has the annoying habit of disagreeing with every opinion he expresses about any of the cultures they encounter. He is assigned to track down a man, Tommy Paine, who apparently travels from planet to planet stirring up trouble. Ronnie is hired as a new agent of a United Planets agency which is supposed to ensure this non-interference. They are held together in a confederation with the number one rule of non-interference with each other. As a result, the various planets have radically different cultures which would see each other as misguided. The premise of this novella is that humanity's expansion out to the stars was often motivated by groups of people who wanted their own planet for their chosen form of political, economic or religious society. 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. 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. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. Many of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, and many of which fulfilled L. Many of MR's stories use SLP jargon such as 'Industrial Feudalism' and most deal with economic issues in some way He was an active supporter of the Socialist Labor Party his father, Verne Reynolds, was twice the SLP's Presidential candidate, in 19. He was quite popular in the 1960s, but most of his work subsequently went out of print. Many of his stories were published in "Galaxy Magazine" and "Worlds of If Magazine". ![]() His pen names included Clark Collins, Mark Mallory, Guy McCord, Dallas Ross and Maxine Reynolds. Dallas McCord "Mack" Reynolds was an American science fiction writer.
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