The Metal Monster

Dr. Goodwin #2

by A. Merritt

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Classics, Speculative Fiction, Ebooks, Pulp

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Abraham Grace Merritt, wrote under the name of A. Merritt, born in New Jersey moved as a child to Philadelphia, Pa. in 1894, began studying law and than switched to journalism. Later a very popular writer starting in 1919 of the teens, twenties and thirties, horror and fantasy genres. King of the purple prose, most famous The Moon Pool, a south seas lost island civilization, hidden underground and The Ship of Ishtar, an Arabian Nights type fable, and six other novels and short stories collections (he had written at first, just for fun). Nobody could do that variety better, sold millions of books in his career. The bright man, became editor of the most successful magazine during the Depression, The American Weekly , with a fabulous $100,000 in salary. A great traveler, in search of unusual items he collected. His private library of 5,000 volumes had many of the occult macabre kind. Yet this talented author is now largely been forgotten.

Reviews

[Henry Avila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would you believe that Dr. Walter T. Goodwin gave Mr. Merritt, an unfinished manuscript to be published of his new adventures in Asia, after having barely survived last year's terror, of 1919 in "The Moon Pool"? neither would I . Still alive , the brainy Mr. Goodwin foolishly or bravely, had embarked on a new dangerous expedition. The renowned botanist wanted to forget...Besides he's a scientist interested in looking for a rare flower, a strange breed indeed. Searching for it in the wilds of mountainous, remote and unknown central Asia, somewhere near romantic Tibet. Obviously Walter is not saying exactly where....With the help of a Chinese interpreter and great cook Chiu-Ming, hired in Persia (Iran) and two ponies also. The men roamed around looking always for the purple plant. Finally after many weeks, meeting .. Dick Drake. An American youth and the son of the Dr.'s late friend really just an old acquaintance. Mr. Drake had arrived there after a visit to Tibet. They find and name an exotic place, Valley of the Blue Poppies. Again coming across Americans this time a brother and sister, Ruth and Martin Ventnor. Surprise, their good friends of Goodwin too what are the chances, only in a novel...Even weirder an army of Persians wearing ancient clothes and with weapons, attack the group now numbering five. These people the descendants of King Darius somehow survived this rugged, hidden land. Looks like the end for Walter and his gang with only a few rifles they can't stop hundreds of fearless soldiers. Just in the nick of time Norhala , goddess, alien, human maybe appears to save the day? Unwelcome though her servant, the Metal Monster, a dizzy hundreds of feet high and unstoppable. An inevitable debacle occurs... however they become prisoners of the Metal City. Countless metal creatures with metallic brains and bodies of different shapes and sizes, "live" there. The view is stranger than strange that's without saying. All working and building for what purpose? The usual evil, conquest of the Earth? Whatever the merit of Mr. Merritt's writings are you can be sure he's the most colorful author in history. Fifty shades of gray for sure. He uses the color green or blue, yellow, red, black, pink and most emphatically purple, etc. etc., numerous times nonetheless not much gray, to describe a scene on a single page....Oh yes, Goodwin gets his flower.

[Thibault Busschots · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Goodwin is on another expedition, this time in the Himalayan mountains. He witnesses a strange aurora-like effect, but he thinks it might be a deliberate one. He goes to explore and meets some new friends. And then they stumble across some metallic objects. But those objects seem to be animate and sentient. Metal objects can’t be alive, can they?


This is the sequel to the Moon Pool, going from the exotic Nan Madol in the previous adventure to the cold and unforgiving Himalayan mountains in this one. And I’m seeing vast improvement. The story grabs us from the beginning and doesn’t let go. The pacing is a lot better. The prose is still a bit much at times but it’s more readable and less exhausting. And the world building is simply on a whole other level.


We’re back in a lost world adventure, with the explorers caught between a rock and a hard place. The conflict that drives the plot forward is about a long lost tribe of Persians once ruled by Xerxes, who had to flee from Alexander the Great’s army and found themselves settling in the mountains. The Persians are the ones who attack the explorers and force them further into the mountains, where they come across Norhala. Norhala is clearly not completely human, looking different and commanding extraordinary powers. And she definitely doesn’t like the Persian army. She takes the explorers to a metallic city that seems very much alive.


The focus of this novel is actually not on the plot but on the world building that follows this strong beginning. HP Lovecraft once said this book “contains the most remarkable presentation of the utterly alien and non-human that I have ever seen.” And I do believe this quote is still very relevant to this day. That just shows how brilliantly imaginative Merritt was as a writer. The world building and the descriptions are completely out of this world creative and simply finger licking good. And the world building is inspired by some of the latest scientific theories from that time, which helps make this world come to life. Though those theories might feel a bit dated now. For a modern audience this might occasionally also feel a bit familiar, as some bits are reminiscent of stories like Transformers, Japanese robot anime or just the mecha genre in general really. But you have to understand this story was written decades before these concepts ever rose to prominence. And even seeing it from a modern perspective, this is still mind blowing, absolutely unique, imaginative and fascinating stuff.


This story does have some flaws. This doesn’t have the greatest plot and the ending in particular could have been done better. The characters are not really fleshed out well, they’re just good enough to fill the shoes they’re supposed to fill for the story to advance. The most intriguing character in this book is Norhala, who is clearly inspired by Ayesha from Henry Rider Haggard’s classic novel She. And even she feels a bit lacking. The plot and characters might be a bit mediocre but more importantly: they’re not bad. And they are neither the focus nor the heart of this story. And because the world building is done so ridiculously well, it absolutely elevates the rest of the book to a whole other level.


This is without a doubt one of Merritt’s best books and simply a masterpiece in terms of world building. If you’re a fan of great sci-fi world building, do yourself a favor and read this.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abraham Merritt's second novel, "The Metal Monster," first saw the light of day in 1920, in "Argosy" magazine. It was not until 1946 that this masterful fantasy creation was printed in book form. In a way, this work is a continuation of Merritt's first novel, "The Moon Pool" (1919), as it is a narrative of America's foremost botanist, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, narrator of that earlier adventure as well. As Goodwin tells us, he initially set out on this second great adventure to forget the terrible incidents of the first; if anything, however, the events depicted in "The Metal Monster" are at least as mindblowing as those in the earlier tale. While Goodwin had encountered underground civilizations, frogmen, battling priestesses and a living-light entity in the earlier tale, this time around he discovers, in the Trans-Himalayan wastes of Tibet, a surviving Persian city, a half-human priestess, AND an entire civilization made up of living, metallic, geometric forms; an entire city of sentient cubes, globes and tetrahedrons, capable of joining together and forming colossal shapes, and wielding death rays and other armaments of destruction. As in the earlier tale, Goodwin is joined in his epic adventure by a small group of can-do individuals that he meets in the most unlikely, godforsaken areas of the world. This time around, it's a brother-and-sister team of scientists, as well as the son of one of Goodwin's old science buddies.

The sense of awe and wonder so crucial to good adventure fantasy is of a very high order in this book. Goodwin & Co., in one of the book's best set pieces, explore the living city of metal, and witness the life forms feeding off the sun, reproducing, and preparing for war. Later on, Merritt treats us to a titanic battle between the metal folk and the lost Persians, as well as an hallucinatory cataclysm at the novel's end. Indeed, much of the book IS hallucinatory, with the metal shapes coalescing and morphing like crazy Transformers gone wild. A book by A. Merritt would be nothing without his hyperstylized, lush purple prose, and in this tale, his gift for somewhat prolix prose is given full vent. At times these incessant descriptions wear a bit thin, and at others they paradoxically fail to stir up pictures in the reader's mind eye. (I defy anyone, for example, to say that he/she was able to fully visualize Goodwin & Co.'s initial nighttime entry into the city of the metal people.) For the most part, though, these descriptions are amazing. Just take this one small sample. Whereas other writers might simply say that Goodwin entered a chamber with multicolored lights, here's what Merritt gives us:

"...a limitless temple of light. High up in it, strewn manifold, danced and shone soft orbs like tender suns. No pale gilt luminaries of frozen rays were these. Effulgent, jubilant, they flamed--orbs red as wine of rubies that Djinns of Al Shiraz press from his enchanted vineyards of jewels; twin orbs rose white as breasts of pampered Babylonian maids; orbs of pulsing opalescences and orbs of the murmuring green of bursting buds of spring, crocused orbs and orbs of royal coral; suns that throbbed with singing rays of wedded rose and pearl and of sapphires and topazes amorous; orbs born of cool virginal dawns and of imperial sunsets and orbs that were the tuliped fruit of mating rainbows of fire...."

Almost like prose poetry, isn't it? With writing like this, a well-thought-out plot, exotic settings and some great action sequences, "The Metal Monster" does indeed live up to its rep as a fantasy classic. There ARE some unanswered questions by the book's end, but that only adds to the aura of cosmic mystery that Merritt has built up. The book is a winner, indeed.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked that.. but i don’t recommend it too strongly. Technically a sequel to The Moon Pool, which was awful, luckily you don’t need to know anything about that to read this.

There.. isn’t really much story in this one, its a lot of descriptions. Luckily its about something akin to A.I. and comparing this early version of A.I. with modern interpretations is what mostly kept my attention.
Oh sure there's still a high priestess and a lovestory and some ancient persians or something... because this is still pulp. However the main event is really the machines.
As i said though lot of descriptions.. long views of a machine city and even longer sections just flying through utter nonsense.. it reminded me of when they’re floating through V’Ger in Star-Trek the Motion Picture.

The descriptive writing is like surfing though.. as long as you can keep processing and visualized it its fine but whenever you lose the thread you can just end up drowning in adjectives for pages.

There are some other interesting aspects, the main characters share lovecrafts terror of the different and this is combined with their sense of white privilege. I loved it whenever they felt themselves mocked by the machines as they always went absolutely nuts over it. Anyway i was rooting for the machines the entire time ;) .

This is an interesting... vision.. when you can keep up with the author and actually manage to visualize it.

Edit: New Words to me.
barmecide :illusory and therefore disappointing.
pandect :a complete body of the laws of a country.

[Jim Kuenzli · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was originally serialized in Argosy in 1920. I wouldn’t consider this one of Merritt’s better efforts. Two thirds of the book consists of purple prose description of pretty much the same things chapter after chapter. If this were a short novella, it could have been quite different.

As with any Merritt story, the flowery prose is any author’s envy. The problem here is that the story could have been told in 200 or so less pages. You never really care much about the characters as they are pretty much secondary to the story, and to the “goddess” of the alien living metal city.

Merritt threw in a lost civilization of Persians in the remote Himalayan setting and an intriguing godlike woman who could control some of the metal entities, yet this ended up more like a tease.

Probably worth a read due to the importance to science fiction/science fantasy. It’s basically an early 1920 view of living metal/ intelligence.

[Armin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kreativer Remix von Motiven aus Henry Rider Haggard (She), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Antike Zivilisationen in der Gegenwart) und H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds). Sprich eine überlegene Spezies ist dabei die Erde zu übernehmen und derart zu planieren, dass die Menschheit mit untergepflügt werden soll. Professor Goodwin, der sich im Himalaja von seinem Moonpool-Trauma erholen will, trifft in einer abgelegenen Ecke wieder einen Abenteurer, der gewissermaßen Larry O Keefe ersetzen soll und ein Geschwisterpaar, das sonst für Zoologen Tiere fängt und auch nicht so recht weiß, wie es dahin gekommen ist und noch weniger, wie man da wieder raus kommt. Die übermächtigen Nachfahren von Xerxes, die sich seit der Schlappen gegen Alexander gewaltig vermehrt, aber waffentechnisch nicht weiterentwickelt haben, bedeuten das Ende der Exkursion, sobald die Munition knapp wird. Doch dann greift eine Dea ex Machina ein, allerdings nur um Ruth zu retten, die Männer sind bedeutungslos, so lange sie sich nicht dumm anstellen und Ansprüche auf die Hauptattraktion anmelden. Relativ früh im Roman nimmt Norhalla ein Lichtbad, das an Haggards She erinnert, die noch an Männern interessiert war. Die Schilderungen antiker Archtitektur und der geometrischen Strukturen, die das Titelwesen hervor bringt, sind großartig, die Energiegewinnung zukunftsweisend, die Psychologie aber Steinzeit. Im Prinzip müsste ich zwei Sterne geben, aber das Gesamtkonzept ist schlüssiger durchgehalten als im Moonpool. Für Geometriemuffel könnten aber manche Partien extrem ermüdend geraten, auch beim Endkampf, der das eigentliche Überraschungsmoment darstellt. Denn im Gegensatz zu Wells spielen Kleinstlebewesen beim finalen Massaker keine Rolle, diese Technik aus einer anderen Welt lässt sich nicht infizieren.

[Jim Mcclanahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed A. Merritt's tales. Most of them read by me at a much earlier age. Re-read Seven Footprints To Satan and The Face In The Abyss recently and still enjoyed them. I read this one for the first time just now. I'm vaguely aware that the original serialized version is considered superior to this embellished tome. I can see why. Much of the descriptive and expository segments are nothing short of soporific. But the grist of the tale is intriguing and seems to depict an imaginative view of contact with an utterly alien entity. The story is terribly dated, but readable nonetheless. However, I found myself using my Kindle Fire's dictionary feature often to parse out some of the author's needlessly pedantic wording. My least favorite Merritt novel, but still worthwhile.

[Denis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got a cool looking paperback copy of this for a couple bucks - mostly for the cover art as I knew very little about this artist other than he published early in the twentieth century. This was a surprisingly good book! First published in 1920, I expected a stiff narrative, clunky plot and so on, as many pre-golden age stories tend to be, and though there were some instances of these elements, overall, this was great adventure, written with crazy and entertaining flamboyant pros by an eccentric with a wild imagination.

After more research, will read more from Merritt.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a far superior as a fantasy novel to the 'Moon Pool', published only a year before and reviewed by us at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... The main protagonist is the same Dr. Goodwin, explorer and scientist.

It still has the occasional lapse into archaic and weird syntax that marred the earlier work but, in other regards, what were weaknesses in his earlier work are now restrained and turned into strengths. The book is certainly helped by not being a 'fix' of pre-set short stories.

The work is recognisably Merritt in so many ways. Perhaps most difficult for the modern reader is the almost synaesthetic attempt to evoke strange states or realms.

The truth is that his effort requires one to be in a half-sleep, perhaps drugged or hypnogogic state, which is where (one supposes) he took part of his inspiration. Because reading a text involves the rational process of stringing words together in order to create sense the effect is not what he may have hoped for or intended.

We can only get close to what he meant to evoke at these moments (such as the journey into the metal monster's city) if we invest serious effort into almost becoming the language, perhaps re-reading it over again for the context and then trying to reproduce his own imagination in our own minds.

Given that the essence of the story is one of Rider Haggard adventurism combined with a science fiction premise close to one that might have been developed by Olaf Stapledon or Lovecraft there is too much of a disconnect here for such sections to work wholly well.

The effort is worthy but it falls between stools - confusing an adventure story with high strangeness yet not making the high strangeness the basis for some advanced poetic experiment.

Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of the fantasy genre. It hangs together as an adventure story at a time when it was possible still to think that mysteries could be found in lands still hardly known to the readers and in a culture where Blavatsky's visions were still current.

One of his key early stories was placed in the far beyond of the North American wilderness. The Moon Pool was set amongst unknown Pacific Isles. This one is set in Central Asia near Tibet. Later he would move his imagination to the South American jungle.

This, with GPS and Google Earth, is scarcely possible today. Even near space has been lost to us as fantasy territory. Antarctica was closed off somewhere between the 'Mountains of Madness' and the myth of Nazi UFOs.

Merritt's next novel would presage this crisis of possibility by shifting into magical past time through a mirror, just as he had his hero move into magical orientalism in his rather beautiful early short story 'Through The Dragon Glass'.

His genius lies in his ability to take what many men dream between wake and sleep and fix it as a sustained narrative and then to weave themes that are clearly of great personal imaginative importance to him into an adventure that genuinely enthralls.

He is a man of his time. The final battle within the metal monster is the battle of a man who has read Milton - a struggle, though, that is closer to Zoroastrian or Manichean myth than anything Christian.

He writes within two years of a horrendous war in Europe and it has clearly marked him (as it does in other stories). The warfare of the metal monster is war as he imagines that it would be experienced as mechanical death-dealing on human flesh.

The sexual mores are also of his time. One of the hall marks of Merritt is an eroticism that is both pulpish and powerful.

There is, of course, the solid all-American girl 'type', the good girl, all spirit but clearly answerable to her brother and to her thoroughly masculine and rather uninteresting soldierly lover whose machismo ways result in little more than a sigh from the modern reader.

As foil, there is the magnificent Norhala, half Persian princess and half metallic and of the stars. She is a goddess in her cold superiority of passion and, although Sekhmet is not named (though other goddesses are), she is Sekhmet incarnate in her waging of war.

The sexual frisson comes from her 'glamour' which mesmerises the good girl adventurer Ruth into what one can only interpret as a full-on dreamy lesbian relationship.

Ruth's descent or ascent (depending on the stance of the reader) into a lost tranquillity away from conformity and duty is symbolised at her rescue by her single bare breast, that of Diana, and her near nakedness that, brought to her senses, she hides and then abandons without embarrassment for the sensible clothes of an explorer.

There is adventure in far away lands, a lost civilisation, creatures beyond time and space and, clearly, beyond our full comprehension, mysteries explained as science, bloody warfare, mesmeric altered states (Merritt undoubtedly had an interest in mind-bending drugs), courageous masculinity and the carefully managed high eroticism centred on idealised women. What more could a man want.

His tales were justifiably substantial sellers, helping to drive Argosy pulp sales in the 1920s and 1930s, and the lost masculinity of their milieu is why they are still engaging today. His books are about dream states and his book has become a dream state.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this for its historic importance to SF but did not enjoy it. It reminded me of a weak H. Rider Haggard novel. Merritt goes for pages describing the subterranean landscape, but I never got a sense of wonder--just a sense of wondering why I kept reading. It would be hard to find characters flatter than the three male leads, who most of the time are doing nothing more than floating above the terrain, watching, or both. They have little effect on anything. Ruth, the love interest, makes Tarzan's Jane look like a multi-faceted character. One-and-a-half stars would be more accurate.

[Димитър Цолов · Rating 4 out of 5]

Фантастика, издържана в духа на Жул Верн и Хърбърт Уелс, но нещо не ѝ достигна да ме спечели. Може би претупаният и нелогичен финал, може би пространните описания на цивилизацията от мислещ метал, скътана в недрата на Тибет. Реална оценка 3,5

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
A. Merritt's The Metal Monster
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 14-18, 2019

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

"Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, it author." - p 5

By now, that's a fairly familiar framing device: the author presents a fictional context in which his bk exists as if to give it factual validity. This strikes me as a particularly late 19th, early 20th century device. Maybe I'm wrong about that. This bk was originally copyrighted in 1920. William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland was written in 1908. As I write in my review of that: "The protagonists find a manuscript at a ruin & decide to read it." ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships (1995) is a spin-off of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). In that:

"Stephen Baxter's "Editor's Note" begins:

""The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had just turned up as a manuscript in an unlabeled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity—"You might make something of it"—knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

""The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original "written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumpled beyond repair." That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript's author, or origin." - p vii" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

Such a beginning from Merritt is no surprise. What did surprise me more was the following:

"The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz." - p 5

How many readers of this review remember Charles Proteus Steinmetz? Now how many of you remember Edison? Tesla? Westinghouse? Steinmetz was famous around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century but seems to be largely forgotten now. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I read a biography about him that I found very inspiring. I even dressed up as him for some sort of costume event at school. He was a hunch-back who wore all black & smoked cigars. He cd generate 'lightning'. It's funny to see mention of him in The Metal Monster b/c it reminds me that he still wd've been topical then, even though he was dead.

This is a fantastic adventure story, quite well-written if one can get beyond a tedium that borders on purple prose.

"In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

"He was a Chinese; his name was Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lämasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin." - p 11

Of course, the 'important thing' here is that he's Chinese & thus can be 'picked up' to be a servant to a 'Westerner'. It wdn't matter if he spoke 75 languages & cd fly he'd still be a servant to the most ignorant American or Britisher. Also, if someone needs to be killed off w/o upsetting the presumed reader too much the Chinese guy can be the one to go.

The writing is 'poetic', by wch I mean full of extravagant & colorful descriptive & metaphorical fluorishes.

"At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds—the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow." - p 12

"The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sprakling ooze of a sea of star shine." - pp 70-71

Whew! I'm not sure that anyone writes like that anymore. Merritt & Hodgson have this style of writing in common. They also describe scenes in this way for llllloooooonnnnnnnngggggg periods of time, commas of splintch.

Now, of course, our main characters are a zillion miles from home in an area where there's little sign of fellow human beings & what shd happen?:

"Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight she sped toward me.

"And as she ran I recognized her.

"Ruth Ventnor!" - p 24

She sure does get around.

""Richard Drake," I said. "Son of old Alvin—you knew him Mart."

""Knew him well," cried Ventnor, seizing Dick's hand. "Wanted me to go to Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish experiments. Is he well?"

""He's dead," replied Dick soberly." - p 25

Now, if Kamchatka is famous for the abundance and size of its brown bears & Kathmandu is the capital and largest city of Nepal I have to wonder if this is some sort of code for going to Kathmandu to get drugs. If this were a century later, the drug might be ketamine. I dunno, maybe it had something to do w/ Heavy Metal.

"With the same startling abruptness there stood erect, where but a moment before they had seethed, a little figure, grotesque; a weirdly humorous, a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and animate—as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life.

"A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!

"Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places." - p 34

A large portion of this bk, perhaps the majority of it, is dedicated to description of this living metal. After a while I found myself (I have no idea where I'd been until then) longing for a break from such description but I have to give Merritt credit for his obsessive VISION, such visions as that of the geometric smiting thing.

"It melted once more—took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing arms was now a tripod thirty feet high, its legs alternate globe and cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres. Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle—writhing, undulating like a serpent of steel, four score yards at least in length.

"At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident. With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly, with fearful precision—joyously—tining those who fled, forking them, tossing them from its points high in the air." - p 44

Even though this bk is only 100 yrs old, it's obvious that the English language has changed over that time & that vocabularies have changed. I actually feel HAPPY just to read words like "trident" & "tining" — not that they're particularly obscure in these times but they're somewhat 'out-of-fashion'.
& what about pony toss? Why, in my youth it was 6 to one half a baker's dozen to t'other that we'd play pony toss at the same time that we'd play croquet.

""Catch," he called; placed one hand beneath the beast's belly, the other under its throat; his shoulders heaved—and up shot the pony; laden as it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me, The faces of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement." - pp 57-58

Why, back in those days, if you drank too much alcohol even your shoulders heaved, albeit a dry heave.

"The sun? Reason returned to me; told me that this globe couldn't be that.

"What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen heel to torment the damned?" - p 64

At 1st I thought: 'It must be Ra-Harmachis, I mean, that's most logical.' Then I remembered being at the bar last night & I took a closer look at the globe & saw that there were 2 of them. But just to make sure I started asking myself more questions.

"What was their color? It came to me—that of the mysterious element which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance." - p 80

No, I was confusing corona w/ areola.

"During the total solar eclipse of 7 August 1869, a green emission line of wavelength 530.3 nm was independently observed by Charles Augustus Young (1834–1908) and William Harkness (1837–1903) in the coronal spectrum. Since this line did not correspond to that of any known material, it was proposed that it was due to an unknown element, provisionally named coronium.

"In 1902, in an attempt at a chemical conception of the aether, the Russian chemist and chemical educator Dmitri Mendeleev hypothesized that there existed two inert chemical elements of lesser atomic weight than hydrogen. Of these two, he thought the lighter to be an all-penetrating, all-pervasive gas, and the slightly heavier one to be coronium. Later he renamed coronium as newtonium.

"It was not until the 1930s that Walter Grotrian and Bengt Edlén discovered that the spectral line at 530.3 nm was due to highly ionized iron (Fe13+); other unusual lines in the coronal spectrum were also caused by highly charged ions, such as nickel, the high ionization being due to the extreme temperature of the solar corona." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronium

Imagine being Isaac Newton & having Alectrona's areola named after you & then having the honor be reduced to a bunch of ionized metals. Life isn't fair. Of course, no matter where you turn Ruth Ventnor's there.

""It whispered to me first," she said, "from Norhala—when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like—like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.

""I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies—and the life I had known only a dream—and you, all of you—even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't—real—and you did not—matter."

""Hypnotism," muttered Drake, as she paused.

""No," she shook her head. "No—more than that.["]" - p 99

Sexual parasitism? You know, like when the female spider eats the male after consummation? Comsumption after consummation? What if Ruth had been a spider who'd just eaten Isaac Newton?

""It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.

""And there was music—strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me—who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all—all—passionless, yet—rapturous.

""Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality—a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were—reassmbling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them." - p 100

I know it sounds thrilling, ladies, but, please don't kill & eat your boyfriends after sex — or ever. Instead, ask yourself:

"["]What is the definition of vital intelligences—sentience?"

""Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?" - p 107

"No, I don't" the woman temporarily distracted from murdering & eating her boyfriend after sex sd. "Please tell me more."

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serious record collectors will be familiar with rock genres like prog rock, krautrock, space rock, and heavy psych. These kinds of music had themes of mysticism, science fiction, fantasy, space travel, drug trip, and the experience of alternate dimensions. Some of it had high technical proficiency while at other times the bands had more imagination and enthusiasm than musical ability. They spanned the full range from profound to downright goofy. The best of these bands are obscure. What all those genres had in common was a strong desire to offer their listeners a mind blowing experience. A. Merritt’s novel The Metal Machine is like a literary version of those genres, albeit one that was published 40 years earlier, and it would appeal to the same kinds of people.

Something has to be said about Merritt’s writing style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. He was a pulp science fiction author who set himself apart by writing in a Victorian style with long sentences, highly detailed descriptiveness, and an over-abundance of adverbs. Some of his sentences seem like little more than strings of adverbs so much so that the meaning of the sentence gets lost. But the descriptions of characters, their surroundings, and the metal creatures they encounter are precise and easy to visualize. Merritt’s dialogue tends to be wooden but conveys the meaning of the story clearly. His descriptive writing style does not work so well with landscapes and background scenery which come off as sketchy, sparse, and sometimes confusing. It does not work so well in passages of violence, warfare, or action either; these battles move slowly when a leaner vocabulary range would have sped up the fights to a normal pace. I do not know if there is a literary equivalent to slow-motion film sequences but if there is, A. Merritt found it. He did have the ability to write descriptive prose well; he just applied it to the wrong parts of the novel. The Metal Monster was serialized, written in monthly installments for a pulp sci-fi magazine and this does effect the flow. There are times when reading it can make you drowsy but if you concentrate and pay attention to all the fine details, it is a rewarding reading experience. Lazy readers, people with short attention spans, and anyone who gets bored with writing that lasts longer than a Twitter post aren’t going to get anything out of this.

Then there are the characters. Professor Goodwin is a botanist, traveling from Persia to Tibet with a Chinese cook he hired in Tehran and a pony, neither of which figure significantly in the story. The cook gets killed off early in the narrative. Goodwin is searching for a rare plant; you may wonder if it is some kind of hallucinogen considering Merritt himself was a botanist who specialized in psychedelics. As he enters a valley filled with blue poppies (yes the poppies used for making heroin), he meets up with his friend’s son Dick Drake. They move on an eventually encounter two more friends, Ventnor and Ruth, who are also brother and sister. How four old friends just happened to meet up with each other while wandering in a remote region of Central Asia is a mystery. If you get too caught up in it, you will not be able to focus on the more interesting aspects of the novel. When strange things begin to happen, a beautiful sorceress named Norhala appears like a fantasy woman and protective mother figure straight out of the pages of Playboy. She saves them from getting killed, falls in love with Ruth, and takes her away to another dimension. Of course, Dick Drake has fallen in love with Ruth and Ventnor is her guardian brother so they have to chase after the two pretty lesbians.

The thrust of the story is that an ancient city of Persians has somehow survived in the valley, untouched by time and living the way they did thousands of years ago. The Persians are ruled by Cherkis, the son of Xerxes whose people had been chased away when Alexander the Great invaded. These timeless fighters are engaged in constant conflict with Norhala who commands a giant metal monster made out of cones, cubs, and spheres. It can change forms according to the needs of the time and works well as a serious ass-kicking war machine that defeats the Persians every time.
A large portion of the book is taken up by descriptions of the metal creatures who are actually parts of a metal city which is a complete living being. The metal city/monster is controlled by a giant upside down cross and an oval disk; they drain energy from the sun to feed the smaller metal particles who do the bidding of Norhala according to her needs. The metal monster is actually peaceful and not inclined to harming anything unless necessary.

In the middle of all the action is Ruth. She is a one-dimensional character, sometimes partially nude and twice tied up for some light bondage scenes; like Helen of Troy, she gets kidnapped and tossed around like a ball from captor to captor. When the Persians abduct her, she is the prize sough after by Norhala the lesbian witch and the metal monster who engage them for the final confrontation.

The key to the meaning of The Metal Monster is revealed when Ventnor explains the dreams and visions he had while unconscious. The metal monster exists sometime in the future; it is literally metal technology that evolved to the point where it became self-conscious and no longer needed humans to control it. The only surviving link between humanity and the metal monster is Norhala and her servant Yukun, a grotesquely deformed eunuch dwarf who is enslaved to her, worships her, and does whatever she commands. He is the symbolic remnant of a human race that is no longer relevant. The novel can be read as a conflict between humanity’s barbaric past, represented by the Persians, and the technological future, represented by the metal monster. The moral ambiguity is that the metal monster is capable of exterminating humanity and nature while the brutal and sadistic Persians show strength and humanity in their reverence for beauty and the desire to fight for survival. Technological advancement comes at a price. Caught in the middle of this struggle are Professor Goodwin and his friends, the representatives of contemporary humanity.

This novel can be considered dated but some knowledge of the cultural context from which it came can go a long way in making it comprehensible. This is a place where context DOES matter so I will politely tell postmodern literary theorists and deconstructionists to fuck off at this point. In the 1920s, metal was a valuable commodity; industrialization, architecture, and the rise of the automobile industry made it one of the most sought-after materials. America was emerging from the Gilded Age and sleek, steely, shiny objects were revered along with their artistic counterpart in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylizations. New discoveries in science were changing the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy. America and Europe had just finished World War I, a meeting ground for primitive barbarity and technological power where the possibility of the mass slaughter of human beings was witnessed by many firsthand. The animistic and occult theologies of Gnosticism and Theosophy were in vogue in some literary and artistic circles. Some writers saw the American version of the English language as a degenerate form of traditional English so they wrote with a Victorian idiom, mistakenly believing themselves to be prese0rving the true English language. Add all these elements into the mix and you can get a clear picture of where A. Merritt was coming from he wrote this.

Finally, I can hear some stoners out there saying, “he must have been doing some heavy drugs when he wrote this”, as if that is a default answer that some people have to anything mystifying, strange, or far out of the norm. I have to say though, even while reading for deeper meaning, there are some passages in The Metal Monster that made me say, “yeah he must have been tripping pretty hard when he wrote this.” There are some long passages that appear to be little more than a light show meant to dazzle people under the influence of LSD. But if you, ahem, are one of those who have experimented with mind-altering substances then those passages can be quite enjoyable. Even if those sections are flawed, along with other aspects of the book, there is still a lot to be gotten out of this unique work of fantasy. You have to make the effort though.

https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/

[Jim Dooley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is classic pulp fiction in the "Amazing Stories" mould. Unlike pulp stories such as the ultra-fun Doc Savage series that are all about adventure and hair-breath escapes, these tended to also add some scientific ... or pseudoscientific ... reasoning for the occurrences. Additionally, they included the occasional archaic word that I always felt was intentionally put there not to sound poetic or egotistical, but to send the Reader scurrying to the dictionary for vocabulary improvement.

A professor from Merritt's previous book, THE MOON POOL, is thrust into another "amazing" adventure when he and his new companions encounter a civilization of creatures made from living metal. This is not just a wild dash of fancy. Merritt is careful to cite references to scientific articles that support the core idea upon which he expounds. His desire to try to find some sort of scientific justification was similar to the approach Jules Verne used in his writing.

There are some major differences.

Merritt knew that it wasn't only adventure and wondrous occurrences that would appeal to his mostly pre-teen and teenage boy Readers. So, there is a great deal of female nudity on "display." No, there are no sex scenes and no graphic descriptions. However, the most voluptuous women wear diaphanous silk drapings or are witnessed wearing nothing as they emerge from bathing, while the girl next door is often hypnotized so she is unaware that a strap has slipped from her shoulder and she is unconscious of her breast being exposed. (To their credit, the heroic men are always embarrassed and turn away!)

Like many "lost civilization science fiction" serials, this one has the metal beings tucked away in a hidden valley among the mountains with a human-appearing female goddess who bears more than a passing resemblance to SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED. They begrudgingly share this retreat with direct descendents of the Persians who were trapped here by Alexander the Great's army, and not much has changed for them since that time.

Merritt's stories are a step above what I often found in those fantasy and science fiction magazines when I was growing up, but it is still pulp fiction. If you don't care for the genre, this will not make you a fan. If you do think that it would be fun to read one of those again, I don't know that you can do too much better.

[Per · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://archive.org/details/Famous_Fa...

I read the third revised version of this story, the author's preferred one.

I am glad you gave me the opportunity of revising “The Metal Monster” before reprinting it. I have never been • satisfied with it. It has some of the best writing in it that I ever did — and some of the worst. It has long been a problem child.
Nor do I and never did, like the title. But it is too late to do anything about that. So I have simply condensed here and there, cut out redundancies and built up a point or two.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3479

The first version is available here: https://archive.org/details/merritt-m...

Three versions of the story exist, the first being the original magazine serialization.
The second version is entitled "The Metal Emperor." It appeared as an eleven-part serial in Hugo Gernsback's Science And Invention magazine from October 1927 to August 1928. It is an abridged version of the first story, with the leading character's name changed to Louis Thorton.
The third version was a "revised version" which was published in the August 1941 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m torn between this bool being awful and being awesome. It’s really weird in what it’s describing, really ambitious, almost psychedelic. But I can’t decide if it works or not; it challenges the reader to envision things that are so far beyond your frame of reference. It’s like if someone actually tried to put into words what other authors just left off as unknowable and incomprehensible.

[David Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I realize this is dated, and that it was originally serialized and likely written very, very quickly, but the purple prose drips off the page. Nothing get a word devoted to it if there can be fifty used instead, and from the very beginning, where a group of people who already know one another end up (for completely different reasons) being stranded in the same odd place in the Himilayas, to the ludicrous escape, it's something of a slog by today's standard. Still, there is some very rich description and interesting usage of imagined tech.

One trigger-warning... the depiction of the Chinese servant and one other who accompany the journey are typical of their time and fairly off-color.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this great crucible of life we call the world—in the vaster one we call the universe—the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores.

This is a phenomenally strange story by an author known for the phenomenally strange. I had put off reading this because I expected the “metal monster” of the title to be some standard robotic nemesis. It is everything but standard.

Merritt does more in this book, I think (I may have just missed it in previous books) to intersperse the real world into the fantasy world.

He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz.

This would almost certainly be Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who is very obscure outside of his somewhat specialized profession. Steinmetz, according to Wikipedia, “had great faith in the ability of machines to eliminate human toil and create abundance for all.”

That, metaphorically, is the Metal Monster.

He also references the “great sunspot of the summer of 1919”, which was real, and which affected the rudimentary electronics of the time, including telegraphs and railroad signals and switches.

Even his fictional coronium, “which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form” was a hypothesis from the real world.

The theme of religion runs through the book. The characters see it everywhere.

Like a vast prayer-rug, sapphire and silken, the poppies stretched to the gray feet of the mountain.

…

Before us lay a wide green bowl held in the hands of the clustered hills; shallow, circular, as though, while plastic still, the thumb of God had run round its rim, shaping it.

The danger of the Metal Monster is that our reliance on it dehumanizes not just us, but our perspective of others.

Beside the two the swathed woman stood, looking out upon that slaughter, calm and still, shrouded with an unearthly tranquillity—viewing it, it came to me, with eyes impersonal, cold, indifferent as the untroubled stars which look down upon hurricane and earthquake in this world of ours.

To the author, the proper relation between man and machine is that between man and the servant animals we surround ourselves with:

There stood the hooded pony and its patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its place as servant to man brought a lump into my throat, salved, I suppose, my human vanity, abased as it had been by the colossal indifference of those things to which we were but playthings.

The other theme, handled more normally, is that of the vastness of the uncaring universe.

I felt myself as fragile as a doll of glass in the hands of careless children.

There was never a point in this story where I guessed successfully where it was going. Part of that is that it was published in 1920, and while I’ve been reading a lot of older science fiction, most of it hasn’t been that old. But another part is that this is not one of Merritt’s (great) adventure stories. He even tantalizes us at one point with a hint of what the characters will do to overcome their vastly superior opponents—it is very hard to believe, and it turns out for good reason.

The visuals are astounding, as are the in-story consequences.

Motionless they stood, huge blocks blackened against the dim glowing of the cones—sentient monoliths; a Druid curve; an arc of a metal Stonehenge. And as at dusk and dawn the great menhirs of Stonehenge fill with a mysterious, granitic life, seem to be praying priests of stone, so about these gathered hierophantic illusion.

[Warren Fournier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of the author's many eccentric habits, A. Merritt collected and cultivated many poisonous and psychoactive plants that had some significance in witchcraft. I believe he partook of too much of his own stash when writing this one.

"The Metal Monster" is a sort of follow-up to his first Dr. Goodwin novel, "The Moon Pool," which had a first act that was a creepy, awe-inspiring piece of weird horror fiction that would have been effective on its own had it not abruptly transformed into a silly fantasy adventure complete with catfighting half-naked priestess babes and giant frog warriors. The beginning of "The Moon Pool" was borderline brilliance that made Lovecraft proud; the rest was pulp schlock that couldn't compete with Burroughs at his worst. I hoped "The Metal Monster" would correct the mistakes of the "Moon Pool." Instead, it embraced what ruined the first story as a potential masterpiece of science fiction. The resulting sequel is an almost unreadable mess.

Like its predecessor, this novel starts off with a sense of otherworldy mystery and awe, as a group of explorers uncover a giant footprint and suspect something huge and very much alive is wandering near their campsite. Then, just like in the first book, some beautiful naked blonde shows up zapping everything in site with her magic powers. But unlike the first book, there is no sense of cohesive narrative. After inexplicably saving the main characters by killing a tribe of marauding prehistoric Persians, she says and does very little by three quarters into the book. We don't know who she is, what are her motivations, or why we should care.

The main characters are equally pointless. First of all, no less than three separate groups of wooden, uninteresting American explorers happen to show up in the same remote and unexplored mountains in Asia at the same time. And they all know each other, acting like a group of coworkers who just happen to have bumped into each other at the grocery store. Ridiculous. Then, everyone, including the goddess gal, takes an instant interest in the one female protagonist, whose character has absolutely no development other than she has curly hair and knows how to use a gun. Worse, the characters all seem to know what's going on with the goddess gal and her metal minions, who they know to be evil even though the antagonists do nothing through almost the whole book except fly around and make pretty lights.

The characters may know what the plot is all about, but the reader does not. The vast majority of the writing is not narrative, but endless descriptions of stuff flying around, lights and rays going off, metal Bristle Blocks sticking together to make countless Transformers, weird hypnotic hallucinations, and just general melodramatic stupidity. Despite all the description, you couldn't tell if the characters were outside or inside, what was happening, or to whom it was happening. After reading about 15 consecutive pages of words like "Cyclopean," a favorite of Merritt's that is as annoying as Lovecraft's "eldritch," and other dazzling, incoherent descriptions of bad acid trips, one of the characters will ask their friend the same question that is burning in the reader's mind--"What just happened?" But the answer from the friend is as unhelpful as we grow to expect, saying things like, "We got electrical indigestion..." Easily 80% of the book was like this.

Lovecraft claimed this was one of his favorite books. Sadly, not one of mine.

[Allegra Gulino · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was interesting as a historical piece in the development of the Sci-Fi genre. Merritt's writing is overall, quite advanced and lyrical -- which I very much enjoyed. However, there are times when he seems blown away by his own idea or the discoveries that the characters gradually witness or make, when familiarizing themselves with the Metal Monster. He overuses exclamation marks -- an amateurish touch, in an otherwise advanced book. But, that's a minor complaint.
A larger problem for me was that much of the plot or action was what I would call 'special effects.' These passages are ornately described, to the point of abstraction -- a geometry or mineralogist teacher would enjoy it -- but overall, shapes moving in different patterns, speeds, textures and colors, lack meaning. Without meaning, these changes also lack tension. They could mean anything, yet seem to effect very little. It would be very difficult to say that the Metal Monster is a character at all, since its made of all these merging, gyrating pieces. Their movement is sentient, but there's little sense of personality, drive or purpose. Yet, such exposition goes on and on. If the description wasn't mesmerizing and picturesque, I would have put the book down.
The other important character, Norhala, without giving anything away, is an odd combination of a beautiful goddess and a cold enigma. After finishing the novel, I still cannot explain her relationship with the Metal Monster, the larger univers or the bizarre army of historical humans.
Yet, the unwitting human explorers have to react to this complex, cold world and its denizens. It's a one-sided echo chamber effect which wasn't satisfying for me, although as it was set up, it was unavoidable.
Again without giving anything away, I found the ending flat as well. I was searching for huge, mortifying consequences of what happened, but instead everything ended neatly, with no hint of trauma in the explorers or for our environment. What was it all for?
It was a unique and richly described experience that was in the end, ambiguous.

[Michael DiBaggio · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting and, at times, enthralling piece of weird adventure fiction. I almost called it a pulp, because it has a lot of the hallmarks of a pulp adventure, but its writing is really in a class beyond. Lovecraft thought this was a classic (if that means anything to you). Certainly, the titular Metal Monster is a truly complex and alien antagonist/plot device. Is it good or evil? Do such labels even make sense to something so different? Is it truly alive, or something else? The contours of these questions may harken the reader back to Arthur Machen's description of true evil in "The White People" and Ambrose Bierce's ponderings on what counts as life and intelligence in "Moxon's Master."

The main characters and their interactions are OK, but nothing to write home about. Protagonist Goodwin is more grounded and believable than in "The Moon Pool" and I actually found the romantic arc between Drake and Ruth Ventnor well crafted. The time lost Persian army, however, struck me as goofy and incongruous.

My biggest complaint about the novel, however, is Merritt's alternately infuriating and awe-inspiring tendency to describe a scene to death. The man had an amazingly deep vocabulary such that he could describe the same phenomena for five pages without repeating a single adjective. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, and really quite uncanny. At times, his descriptions reach the heights of poetry (my favorite: "It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes."), but it's really a bit too much. The book is actually not very long, but this peculiar habit of the author makes it seem interminable in parts.

Overall though, its worth a read, and since its in the public domain, the price is right.

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel was a huge hit when published in 1912. Capitalizing on the popularity or Verne and HG Wells, this author filled the book with page after page of purple prose. Oddly, it doesn't seem dated. Mainly, because his monster is quite fractal and much of the imagery is full of floating rectangle, triangles and mathematical shapes. I kind of shocked myself at how much fun this was to read. I think the best way is to show you. Here is a sample of the writing (it flows this way for hundreds of pages and never gets boring):

"In this great crucible of life we call the world—in the vaster one we call the universe—the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean's shores. They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope's peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.

Sometimes the veils drop from a man's eyes, and he sees—and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they fall upon and destroy him.

For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed; upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for himself a hearing.

There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it, shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat over legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.

Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of Cosmos.

[Jacob Blanchet · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me years to finally get to this book (and for no particular reason other than I just got to other stuff first) and, hoo boy, I totally could have waited many more, to be honest.

The only reason I give this a third star is because Merritt’s prose is wonderful. Sometimes it’s downright prose poetry, it’s nothing short of beautiful. It can be a bit purple and verbose, but that’s my jam; give me ALL the adjectives and esoteric words.

Now, I go for atmosphere over anything else, and this book is full of that, but! HOLY MACKERAL is it boring. I honestly spent most of the time while reading this wondering “is something going to happen?” and towards the end I thought “should I even keep reading?”

The descriptions of EVERYTHING were so long-winded, convoluted and confusing. All the narrator had to say, for example, was “it was a hollow box that opened into four panels” yet instead he spent two paragraphs describing it so abstractly that it just turned into a jumbled mess in my brain. Descriptions are supposed to paint a clear picture in your mind, not fill it with Pollack paintings covered in Legos (which is what I saw 90% of the time). Granted it’s a tough subject, lots of geometrical shapes and unique imagery that would be hard to explain anyway, but I honestly feel like he made it MUCH harder than it should have been for the sake of word count (or masturbation).

That being said I read the revised pulpy paperback version of the story (with the wonderful Powers cover!). I’ve been told that the original serialized version is SO much better so once this fades from my brain a bit I’ll check that out eventually. I definitely found that Merritt’s original “The Moon Pool” story was FAR superior than the novelized version so this I guess makes sense. Not sure why he didn’t just leave his work alone; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, that sort of thing.

Done and done, and thank Gods for that.

[Rich Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another one of those novels that you have to read with an eye toward the era in which it was written - this is Platinum Age science fiction, the kind that rode in on the tails of Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and the like. The prose construction is more descriptiive and less character-driven than modern writing.

Considering this was nearly a Victorian-era novel, some of the concepts in it are surprisingly progressive and innovative. The descriptions of the Metal Monster and the inner world it inhabits are very intriguing, as is the implied relationship between Norhala and Ruth.

The writing is good, and I'm a fan of Merritt - he always reminds me of Wilkie Collins for some reason - but the book is definitely dated and a bit slow in places. Still, it is a decent read if you like this pioneering era of science fiction. I would say it is on a par with the previous Dr. Goodwin book, The Moon Pool.

[Martyn Vaughan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A typical Merritt yarn. This one involves a race of creatures entirely composed of metal, which may or may not have come from another planet. They have taken up residence in the Himalayas where they plot to overthrow humankind. Mixed up in this in some obscure way are people who are the descendants of the Persia of Xerxes and who have maintained their culture, somehow undetected by the rest of the world. And last, but by no means least, is the enigmatic, cruel, but sublimely beautiful priestess, Norhala, who has a bone to pick with the Persians.
None of it makes much sense and Merritt uses every word for colour in the English language in successive sentences.
In the end, all is well as the Metal Monster or Monsters has a civil war and destroys itself along with Norhala allowing our heroes to return to their native USA.

[Knight Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up. Other reviewers have stated it already so I won't go into it, but the long winded, non-stop flowery descriptions of crazy goings-on, started numbing my brain. At first, it was great, but quickly became monotonous and I couldn't visualize most of what was going on, probably because I no longer cared. I got more than halfway through and nothing of note was happening, they just kept traveling around the metal area, doing nothing! Not worth wasting any more time on this dreck.
My first story from Merritt was the People of the Pit which is great, so I acquired a few of his novels thinking they'd live up to that. They don't, IMO. Short story length is long enough--weak character development and overblown descriptions of surroundings can work in a story, but not in a novel.

[Xabier Cid · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've found this book amazingly interesting. The worlds depicted and the plot itself, going back to the lost tribe of Persians, going forward to a technological empire of spheres and cones moved by direct solar energy, are the proof of a great and passionate imagination. Even the particular relationship linking the princess/queen Norhala and the girl (Ruth) is nothing but the key for reading the whole book —not only that story— as an example of pioneering LGBT sci-fi. However, all those positive aspects are darkened by a horrendous translation, plenty of errors, non-sense sentences and unconnected syntax making difficult not only the book's understanding, but also the very reading process. What a pity!

[Norman Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was first serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920 and features the return of Dr. Walter T. Goodwin who first appeared in The Moon Pool.
The story tells of Dr. Goodwin's incredible tale of his encounter with a lost race of tiny metal creatures in the Trans-Himalayan Mountains. The most interesting part of the book is the description of the mobile nanobots, which foreshadow modern science fiction marvels such as the liquid metal T-1000 of Terminator 2 fame. These metal creatures were undoubtedly amazing to the 1920s readers. For today's readers, the flat characters and overwritten prose are less than amazing. This would have made an excellent short story.

[DeWayne Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about this book in a critique of The Challenge from Beyond, where I saw that Lovecraft had called The Metal Monster, "the most remarkable presentation of the utterly alien and non-human that I have ever seen." Seemed like it would be interesting.

This is classic science-fantasy on an epic scale and it does not disappoint. It has a heavy narrative voice at times, but the exploration of how alien an alien mind and existence can be is very profound. I particularly found the contrast of chaotic man with ordered metal to be engaging. Life as man understands it has the chaos of struggle while imagining that life from something more structured like metal with a crystalline structure must see everything very differently.

[Douglas Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another early work by a writer I've enjoyed in the past. But this one, like The Moon Pool, was painful to finish. I'm guessing this was serialized, and Merritt was paid by the word. Badly needed editing and could have been a much shorter (and better) book. An interesting concept of a metal-based, hive mind creature feeding on energy it steals from our sun, and that can reassemble itself into any shape. But the visual descriptions managed to be both too detailed and still confusing (and boring). His next work, I believe, was The Ship of Ishtar, which I remember enjoying a lot. So again, a writer I'd recommend from the "Golden Age" but skip this one and The Moon Pool. Or prepare to slog.