Mack Reynolds
Satellite City

One of the most recurring physical locations in many science fiction stories is that of orbiting cities that are, in all cases, accessible only to a few and often consist of luxury tourist attractions and space casinos, where there are few rules (the main one: keep your mouth shut) and no taxes are paid. A sort of free port where no jurisdiction applies.

It's the late seventies when, after the first landings on the Moon, the construction of a space platform was begun. Billions were invested, when suddenly it was decided to completely change the plans and focus on a base on the lunar surface, 'Luna City.' The dilemma at this point was: what to do with the space platform? The answer was its transfer to a private organization, the Satellite City Authority, which presented itself as a non-profit organization that would manage the platform where important scientific workers and an orbital hospital were located.

However, 'Satellite City' soon created its own independent banking system and the Satellite City stock exchange was established, a thorn in the side of all stock markets on Earth, and consequently opened to gaming houses and space tourism activities. A luxury for the few but an incredibly profitable venture.

It's in this context that we meet our anti-hero, private investigator Rex Bader, the protagonist of this novel by Mack Reynolds first published in 1975, which we can clearly consider freely inspired by Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe (which private investigator in the world of literature and cinema is not, after all).

Officially, Bader is on Satellite City, on a government assignment and of course incognito, to find out to what extent the activities allowed on the platform and its visitors might be 'legitimate,' where it is said that everything is allowed and anything can be bought. However, soon after having already clashed with the harshness of the local security representatives, he will find himself involved in a sort of international crisis and commissioned by the world's major powers, the United States of America, the Common Europe, and the USSR, to track down the mysterious international criminal and revolutionary leader Che Djilas, who according to intelligence services has found refuge in the City, whose representatives they say are covering his identity in order to favor revolutionary actions aimed at damaging and altering the prevailing geopolitical balance on Earth.

His mission is particularly complex and nearly impossible if one considers what is the true nature of Satellite City and the Satellite City Authority, behind which actually hide the main mafia families of the planet, led by the boss of bosses Don Nicola 'Big Nick' Mangano. A corporation that is just one of many in the USA run directly by mafia associations, believed to have infiltrators and their own representatives even within the same government institutions.

From this perspective, Mack Reynolds is certainly ahead of his time, representing in detail the functioning of that ultimate phase of mafia evolution and reconstructing its history from the 1200s-1300s with its Sicilian roots to the events in the USA of his days. We are, after all, in front of an author as imaginative as he is endowed with great intelligence, capable of opening spaces within the narrative to reflections of a geopolitical nature that surpass the years of the cold war and look forward twenty-thirty years to our days. Critical of the United States of America as much as of the Western world as a whole and the Soviet Union, Reynolds focuses his attention on those international balances that would become the main topic of discussion in the years to come and are somehow also current themes.

All this happens mostly through the dialogues between characters and in a context where true science at some point also meets spiritism and superstition, to the theorization of the possibility of the existence of subjects with telekinetic abilities amplified by the use of hallucinogenic drugs and the mention of a figure as popular as eccentric as that of the Italian spiritualist and medium Eusapia Palladino.

'Satellite City' is a science fiction novel with the style of genre classics mixed with the typical flavors of spy stories and a certain irony that can be typical of both genres and facilitates reading an engaging story where all the most typical figures of the hard-boiled imagination of Chandler and Dashiel Hammett can be found, making this short novel an engaging narrative written in a simple, straightforward, clean manner, just as we fans of the more 'classic' style of science fiction and less cerebral works like it.