Armchair Fiction presents classic science fiction double novels. The first novel is “The World at Bay” by veteran science fiction writers B. Wallis & Geo. C. Wallis. They came from inside the earth! When the first news began to dribble in from South America, confusion set upon an unsuspecting world. An invasion of strange, short, pale creatures who manned unbelievable airships, which could rise and fall with ease, had emerged from within the Earth. Their mission—chaos. With increasing reports of these menacing beings destroying ships and small cities, the editor of the New York Scoop sent two of his best reporters, Max Harding and Dick Martin, to South America to cover the next alien assault. When they arrived, they found the once bustling Brazilian city of Rio an empty metropolitan shell. The city’s eerie quiet resonated deafeningly through the reporters’ ears. However, the thousands of inhabitants hadn’t fled their homes—they were all dead. Could the world band together to push back these hideous attackers, or would human civilization crumble under the onslaught of these invaders from within? The second novel is Capt. S. P. Meek’s “The Red Peril,” which is a great tale from the golden age of Amazing Stories magazine. What shape would future warfare take? Mankind had never imagined that wars of the future would be fought with anything but guns, planes, and atomic weapons. No, in fact the world was stunned to find that their rifles, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and other weapons of war would be useless against the tiniest weapon of all… Germs! This new instrument of mass destruction, a deadly strain of pneumonia, would take its place as the most deadly mechanism of war ever devised, killing millions of people with a single exposure; a weapon so unseen and so utterly insidious that it would spread like a catastrophic tidal wave across the world. Would the governments of Earth be able to combat the quickly spreading particles of disease or would the world be enveloped in an invisible cloud of death?
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