Satellite City

Lagrange

by Mack Reynolds

SATELLITE CITY
THE MOST EXPENSIVE, THE MOST LUXURIOUS RESORT IN THE HISTORY OF MAN. No request, no whim or pleasure, was denied. Where anything was possible … for a price.

SATELLITE CITY
THE HAVEN AND THE PLAYGROUND OF ONLY THE VERY RICH AND THE MOST POWERFUL. It was the most amazing pleasure complex ever built - and it looked down on Earth from orbit 22,000 miles high.

Yet, for all its glitter, there was something ominous about Satellite City – no nation or international body had any jurisdiction there, it was a law unto itself; no one knew who owned it; or what went on within its secret council rooms.

UNTIL ONE MAN PENETRATED THE WALL OF SECRECY AND DISCOVERED SATELLITE CITY'S HIDDEN MASTERS.

Genres: Science Fiction

238 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 1975

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

[Craig]

Satellite City was an original novel published by Ace in 1975 with a good space-station cover by Davis Meltzer and the blurb next to the title that read, "Voted most popular science fiction author by the readers of Galaxy and If" that Ace ran on dozens of Reynolds' books. It's a Rex Bader private-eye-in-space novel, and is an early part of his Lagrange series, though I don't recall that phrase being used in this one. It's a typical Reynolds adventure with lots of political/socioeconomic discussion and sexist attitudes of the time, tempered with James Bond-type action and adventure. Between the Russians and the Mafia and the IRS and the nutjobs, who can Rex trust?

[Roger]

This was a favourite of mine as a teenager. I was amazed to find that I remembered almost nothing of it. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed it. Very old school in feel, but surprisingly not all that dated. Mack Reynolds wrote a heap of books. I might have to check out a few more of them.

[Caitlin Theroux]

Do you enjoy exposition that's called out by characters themselves? Or a future that uses the words "auto" and "pseudo" for almost everything? How about an ending that makes little sense and dialogue that forces you to swallow it like hot castor oil?

Yes? Then this is the book for you!

[Mason]

An interesting old school science-fiction book that was a real page turner! The plot takes many loops and turns that are very cool! The satellite city itself is a very well done setting. I don’t give this great read it a five due to some long winded explanations to deliver plot and spelling mistakes; these aren’t very frequent but encountered nevertheless.

[Josh]

Bad writing, unimaginative concept. DNF