Reynolds sought to shake his readers' complacent acceptance of Cold War capitalism by depicting a variety of post-capitalist near futures, many of which he envisioned could occur around the year 2000. His stories, therefore, cover an assortment of social systems including anarchy, communism, technocracy, syndicalism, meritocracy, various forms of socialism and an extrapolation of free-enterprise economics, People's Capitalism. In addition, some of his stories set up a rivalry between a collective and a competitive economy in order to assess their respective merits, sometimes coming to the conclusion that they cannot be compared except for their imperialistic aims, as in the novella "Adaptation," while at other times both systems are revealed to be equally decadent and stagnant, as in the Joe Mauser story "Frigid Fracas."