Armchair Fiction presents classic science fiction double novels with original illustrations. The first novel is Harlan Ellison's "Biddy and the Silver Man." Her name was Biddy, and she was just a kid. She was different from the other kids in Sage Band, though. She'd had polio and one of her legs was withered and crippled. But she could still get around with the help of an easy-going burro named Buck. Biddy and Buck had explored all the desert lands around Sage Bend-she knew every square foot. Then one day a cave appeared in the side of a rock wall that hadn't been there before.

In that cave Biddy found a strange man, a strange machine, a cure for her malady, and the key to mankind's future? "Biddy and the Silver Man" is a wonderful short novel. It's the story of a young family's struggles in a desert town that had little going for it. It's a tale of the twists and turns that can shape a man's character-for good or evil. It's a tale of aliens and spacecraft and ultimate ultimatums. But most of all, it's a tale of mankind's defining moment, in which all of humanity must choose to either step forwards or backwards. The second novel is "Four-Day Planet" by H. Beam Piper. Fenris was a planet forgotten in the backwash of a great frontier movement.

It suffered from an appalling climate and uniformly hostile animal life and barely maintained a population of space bums, fugitives, and a few rough-and-ready colonists. Yet it was home to Walter Boyd, the only one he had known for eighteen years, and Walter found that any home was worth fighting for-even in a far-off place as inhospitable and as dangerous as Fenris? In this exciting science fiction thriller from the past, Henry Beam Piper creates a strange, sometimes desolate, sometimes humorous world of the future as a background for a tale filled with adventure and excitement, as well as some thoughts about human beings, which are valid in any time or place. "Four-Day Planet" was clearly one of Piper's best novels.