Secret of the Martians & The Variable Man

Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic science fiction double novels. The first novel is Paul W. Fairman’s “Secret of the Martians.” Were Martians really dangerous? No human being on Earth or Mars seemed to think so. Very few of the human colonists had ever even seen a Martian. Indeed, the Martians had essentially given way to Terran colonists centuries before and allowed them to have all the equatorial regions of the planet for farming and other human endeavors. The Martians themselves retreated to the northern countries near the polar ice cap. There they had lived in isolation for many generations. But then one day the slain body of a Terran botanist was found. When a security agent from Earth was sent in to investigate, he found himself in a web of interplanetary conspiracy that threatened the existence of every human being on Mars, and possibly Earth itself.. The second novel is from the man who gave us “The Minority Report,” Philip K. Dick. “The Variable Man” is about a man who liked to tinker. He was always tinkering with things, fixing things, everything from clocks to refrigerators to vidsenders…and to destinies. But one thing was certain, he had no business in the world of the future, where the calculators simply couldn’t handle him. On one hand he was Earth’s only hope…and on the other hand he was its sure failure. Join sci-fi maestro Philip K. Dick for one of his earliest works. “The Variable Man” was first published in the September issue of “Space Science Fiction” magazine, all the way back in 1953. Even at this early stage of his career, Dick’s talent for writing was obvious in this strange tale of strange man in the far-off future.