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Armchair Fiction presents extra-large editions of classic science fiction double novels with original illustrations. The first novel, “The Hidden World” is by one of sci-fi’s most heralded authors, Edmond Hamilton. Once in a while a story comes along that for sheer white knuckle thrills, towers above the usual run of similar tales. “The Hidden World,” when first published in the Fall 1929 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly, was just such a story. There have been many novels about the interior of Earth, written by some of science fiction’s most notable authors: Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Stanton Coblentz to mention a few. But this is one of the most unusual of them all. It is the tale of two men who discover another world, hanging suspended inside the bowels of the Earth. It is also the tale of a monstrous race of creatures, whose plans for the human race are anything but friendly. Edmond Hamilton’s “The Hidden World” is a marvelous adventure story in addition to being a true masterpiece of early science fiction. Hamilton’s publisher, Hugo Gernsback, had this to say about it back in 1929: “It certainly is one of the most exciting stories that it has been our good fortune to read. And we know that you will not wish to lay down the book till you finish it.” The second novel is “You Can’t Buy Eternity” by well known science fiction author Dwight V. Swain. Stewart Ross was a squeaky-clean, top-ranked special agent for the FedGov Security Agency. His latest job, though, was a dirty one: He was to masquerade under the name of Lewis Thigpen, a scientist suspected of stealing a valuable catalyst and also of committing the gruesome, throat-cutting murder of his boss, Dr. Tornelescu. But unknown to most, Thigpen himself was already six feet under, having dropped dead from a heart attack well before Tornelescu’s murder. So it was up to Stewart Ross, posing as this disgraced scientist, to find out not only who the real killer was, but to locate and secure the stolen catalyst and its formula, a formula that promised the secret that all men craved…the secret of immortality. Unfortunately for Ross, he soon found himself hopelessly lost in a web of scientific intrigue and danger…
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