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Armchair Fiction presents classic science fiction double novels with original illustrations. The leadoff novel is “Brainstorm” by one of the more underrated authors of the 1940s and 1950s, Rog Phillips. Was there no end to the ceaseless stream of aggravation surging into Marvin Swank’s once peaceful life like a tormenting tidal wave of fury? Everyone seemed bound and determined to upset the tranquility of this mild-mannered credit manager’s life. From his wife’s endless nagging, to his friends’ sticking their noses into his business, it was just too much for him. Even strangers walking along the sidewalk were enough to drive him into a tizzy. There seemed to be nothing that wouldn’t send poor Marvin into a downward spiral of madness. It would be Marvin’s wife Mary who first noticed the change in the man, as her joking, pleasant husband turned into an uncouth brute who made their once quiet life a living nightmare. Fearing for her safety and the safety of others who encountered Marvin, there was only one thing left to do, make a call to the men in the white coats, and reserve a room at the local loony bin. The second novel is “The Defiant Agents” by beloved science fiction author Andre Norton. It was called “Operation Cochise,” a carefully planned move to colonize a planet ahead of the Reds. Travis Fox had been an eager volunteerfor this program, but the morning he dragged himself half-conscious from the wrecked spaceship on the planet Topaz, he sensed the terror which would threaten the project. Travis never learned why the ship had crashed, nor why he and the other Apache agents had been shot into space without warning and under Redax control, a machine which had returned them to ancestral mentality. But the dangers on Topaz demanded free minds, for Travis soon realized that if the Reds already encamped beyond the mountains—a horde of barbaric Mongols completely dominated by their masters—discovered the secret of the eerie underground chamber in the towers hidden in a valley of mist, not only Topaz but Terra itself would be destroyed.
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