Mack Reynolds
The Rival Rigelians

Mack Reynolds was a highly prolific literary author with a commitment to various genres and different pseudonyms. He worked for IBM and served in the United States Army during World War II. A socialist, he dedicated himself full-time to writing and was a member of the party; after the war, he embarked on a journey with his wife to Europe that lasted over ten years. When he returned, he had revised his thinking, moving away from more traditional dogmatic forms and drawing inspiration from an ideological compromise closer to social democracy. This led to his expulsion from the party but clearly did not stop his speculative interest in politics and society and its structures, nor did it slow down his literary activity, where he often tells stories combining the science fiction element with considerations on the state of society drawn from his historical context.

The theme is closely developed in the confrontation between the two major systems of the 1960s, the Soviet and the capitalist, in this 1968 novel entitled "The Rival Rigelians," published in Italy with the title "Genoa - Texcoco: zero a zero." But soccer, beyond appearances, has nothing to do with it. Apart from the reference on a beautiful cover illustration by Karel Thole for the publication in the "Millemondi" series.

We are in a remote future. Earth has resolved all its internal issues and has meanwhile launched a space colonization program which, unable to monitor closely, developed by creating small colonies made up of about a hundred men left to their fate for a thousand years. Now this time has passed, and although man has survived by adapting to the environment, he has had to start from scratch, losing all knowledge. The mission led by Amschel Mayer and Leonid Plekhanov, consisting of 18 members, aims to reach two of these planets in the Rigel system and bring their respective populations to a level of civilization that would allow them admission to the Galactic Commonwealth within 50 years. The population on the two planets has developed differently: "Genoa" is a world where the most advanced civilization is comparable to that of Italian cities during the feudal period, while that on "Texcoco" is comparable to the Aztec civilization at the time of the Spanish conquest.

The group, tasked with operating in a unified manner, instead decides on ideological grounds and almost as a challenge to divide into two parts. On Texcoco, the goal will be to conquer the entire planet, obtaining consent through the force of arms and aiming to establish a social system based on communes; on Genoa, it is decided to opt for the free market. In both situations, the inevitable contradictions of the two systems, assumed in a dogmatic manner and taken to their most extreme consequences, will emerge. But the novel is, along with being full of historical insights and references, also a reconstruction of the systems of colonial politics in the style of Mike Resnick's science fiction literary works. Perhaps less raw and shrewd, but equally brilliant and certainly recommended.