A New World, A Metal World: The Metal Monster at 100

August 7, 2020 Al Harron

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Abraham Merritt's The Metal Monster. First published in the August 7 – September 25 1920 editions of Argosy All-Story Weekly, this weird tale mixes two-fisted pulp action with some of the most alien and otherworldly creations not just of Merritt's own considerable ouvre, but that of all pulp fiction. Indeed, as with so much of Merritt's work, many aspects of the story are truly ahead of its time.

A Way to Waken the Mountains

The story starts in the “author as ghostwriter” conceit, as was the fashion of the time ever since its popularisation by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Sword and Planet tales, and indeed utilised by Merritt himself in other stories such as The Moon Pool. So ubiquitous is this method of acclimatising the reader to tales of death-defying derring-do, it almost lulls the reader into a false sense of security – that this adventure will be just another ripping yarn, good for the mental exercise, but could safely be put down after reading. Merritt dispenses with that comfort cruelly within the first chapter, as something strange happens to Goodwin – the hero of the tale – in Merritt's very own presence. Goodwin's terror will be familiar to readers raised on Lovecraft and Blackwood – but where those authors' forte is in describing the indescribable, Merritt has a knack for conveying the horror of realisation, the revelation of something that should not be in a way that not even the scientific mind can brace.

From the unquiet prologue, Goodwin tells his tale – which begins in the vast Transhimalaya, or Gangdise-Nyenchen Tanghla mountain range, near Tibet. The great mountains of the East have been a favoured setting for pulp adventures since the heyday of Kipling, Mundy, and Lamb, so Merritt doesn't have to explain overmuch to the discerning Argosy aficionado. Nonetheless, the weirdness continues, as Goodwin and his newfound American pal Richard Drake encounter the “Ting-Pa,” the Tibetan name attributed to a local sunbeam phenomenon – one which takes on a sinister aspect when something reaches for the rays and breaks them. From then on, things just get weirder and weirder – impossibly huge footprints, ruins that seem to project a sense of psychic unease, and what appear to be time-displaced Persian soldiers from the time of Alexander's conquests. Weirdest of all are the strange geometric artifacts our heroes encounter – objects which suddenly come to terrible, impossible life:

… Touching the ring causes the shapes to spring to life, and after assembling themselves in various forms, including a foot-high ‘kobold’, the shapes scurry away and out of sight. None of the observers can avoid the obvious impression the shapes had placed upon them:

These curious metal objects kick the story into high gear: as the Persians attack our heroes, the beautiful and terrible figure of Norhala arrives on the scene, seeming to command a veritable flood of these metal beings. They assembled and disassembled into a multitude of forms, culminating in a gigantic two-headed, six-armed, writhing thing, and lay bloody waste to the human army. Norhala takes the four heroes with her, and they are taken to a Metal City, ruled by a Metal Emperor, which watches with Metal Eyes...

Robots in Disguise

Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases; the six rolling spheres touched them, joined the spinning, and with sleight-of-hand suddenness the ring drew together; its units coalesced, cubes and pyramids and globes threading with a curious suggestion of ferment. 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. Their shiftings were like the transformations one sees within a kaleidoscope. And in each vanishing form was the suggestion of unfamiliar harmonies, of a subtle, a transcendental geometric art as though each swift shaping were a symbol, a WORD— Euclid's problems given volition! Geometry endowed with consciousness!

The preeminent transforming metal beings in modern popular culture are, of course, Transformers, first arriving on the scene in 1984 – but the natural history of the gigantic alien metal-based lifeform is even older.

The notion of an artificial intelligence made in the shape of humans has a long history in folklore and legend: Pandora and Galatea of Greek Mythology, and the Golem of Jewish lore, were shaped from earthly materials much in the same way as the 20th Century's Wonder Woman, while intelligent beings are known to spring from such unlikely sources as spilt Gorgon blood, sown Dragon's Teeth, and the foreheads of dead titans. In particular, beings of metal with the intelligence of humans are well-attested: Talos, the bronze titan immortalised in modern popular culture thanks to Jason and the Argonauts, was a bronze giant either forged by Hephaestus to stand watch over the island of Crete (Bibliotheca, Pseudo-Apollodorus, ca 200 A.D.), or but one of an entire “Bronze Race” (Works and Days, Hesiod, ca 700 B.C.) Many ingenious innovators – the Zhou Dynasty artificer Yan Shi, the Helleno-Egyptian engineer Hero of Alexandria, the Artuwid polymath Ismail al-Jazari – constructed “automatons” of different shapes and sizes with uncanny verisimilitude, bringing the semblance of life to manmade figures.

Few mythologies consider artificial intelligences forged from metal in any form beyond that of the familiar – humans, birds, beasts, even the familiar monsters of fairy tales and yore. The forms which the Metal Monster takes are not only inhuman, they are unearthly – they have vague similarities that are somewhat analogous to earth counterparts, but only on mechanical levels, such as the hominid “kobold” and the “bridge” which faintly resembles a “nightmare Brontosaurus.” There are mythological shapeshifters, of course, from the Celtic selkie and Indian rakshasa to African Kaggen and Japanese bakemono. Indeed, the Pacific Northwest Salishan peoples even have spirit-beings collectively called “Transformers”; sometimes distinct from the more familiar Trickster, sometimes merged together. Shinto tradition even has the curious tsukumogami, household objects which have acquired souls – lanterns, sandals, futons, gongs, mirrors, parasols – and can take on the appearance of humans or monsters. The Japanese had their own automatons, too, in clockwork toys popular in the 1880s.

Not long after The Metal Monster was published, Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1920) all but codified the idea of artificial humans and provided the name which we apply to the more familiar metal machines – robot. “Rossum's Universal Robots” were not mechanical in nature, but organic beings barely distinguishable from “real” humans – ancestors to Blade Runner's replicants as well as metal robots. It wasn't until Thea von Harbou's Metropolis (1925) that the first man-made robot that we would understand – the Maschinenmensch Futura (Maria in Lang's 1927 film) – made her debut, and given that she takes on a human likeness, one could even argue she was a “robot in disguise” too! The “modern” robot soon exploded on the scene, in film (The Mechanical Man, 1921), newspaper strips (Tanku Tankuro, 1934), wartime propaganda (The Science Warrior Arrives in New York), and of course whole reams of science fiction magazines exemplified by such yarns as Edmond Hamilton's “The Metal Giants” (1926) and Eando Binder's “I, Robot” (1938). A whole decade before the Transformers, Brave Raideen (1975) introduced an intelligent machine built by an extinct prehistoric civilisation which could shift from a humanoid to a bird-like jet, the Godbird. Raideen, along with fellow transforming/combining robots Gaiking, Grendizer, Getter Robo, Gaiking, and Mazinger, were culturally transformed into the U.S. Shogun Warriors toyline – even the American Transformers' emergence from the Japanese Diaclone & Microman toylines had a precedent.

Setting the Transformers apart from the rest is their specific origins. Whereas most robots are artificial – that is, created by another species as servitors, soldiers, or simple experiments – the transforming robots of Cybertron were (at least in the beginning) naturally occurring. Marvel's The Transformers #1 (1984) proposed that “whereas life elsewhere in the cosmos usually evolved through carbon-bonding, here it was the interaction of naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys that miraculously brought forth sentient beings.” Unfortunately, this bold (if a bit clumsily explained) “atechnogenesis” was later supplanted by more traditional creation myths, either through predictable intelligent design (the machine god Primus in the comics, or the malevolent Quintessons in the cartoons) or vague semi-mystical space magic (the Allspark of the films). It is unfortunate that Bob Budiansky's original notion could have been tweaked, offering a much more interesting and alien explanation for the giant metal men than “they were built by an advanced civilisation as slaves.”

It's difficult to find an earlier example of an intelligent, transforming machine than the Metal Monster – especially one that is so evocative of the weirder examples of the genre.

“Itself and its hordes that were – Itself?”

But it is the concept of the “hordes that were Itself” which is most profoundly modern. The titular “Metal Monster” is among the first to emerge in fantastic fiction, an incredible being which can take a limitless multitude of forms: a colony organism with the power of transhuman intellect. Science Fiction has explored the idea of alien societies formed in an image analogous to the humble ant colony, as in Wells' “The First Men on the Moon” (The Strand Magazine, December 1900 – August 1901). The Selenites have a sophisticated intelligence, advanced technology, and a multitude of forms outwardly reminiscent of terrestrial ants. Such forms include broad-shouldered workers, spider-limbed ushers, huge-brained intellectuals, and a “queen” in the form of the Grand Lunar. However, whether they possess a shared consciousness developed enough to consider the entire Selenite population as a single “biomass” is not made explicit.

The earliest depiction of a shared mind as we would define it is sometimes attributed to Olaf Stapledon's hugely groundbreaking and frighteningly prophetic First and Last Men (1930), less a traditional science fiction narrative and more a speculative natural history of humanity's future evolution through 18 forms. This final 18th species, the Last Men, are capable of forming telepathic connections with all other individuals at once, forming a “racial mind.” Nonetheless, this mind is a temporary state, a stepping stone to a transcendentalist future of cosmological enlightenment: it is not a mind in and of itself, a “composite being” like the “bird-clouds” in Star Maker (1937), Stapledon's spiritual sequel to Last and First Men:

Sometimes in the course of our adventure we came upon worlds inhabited by intelligent beings, whose developed personality was an expression not of the single individual organism but of a group of organisms. In most cases this state of affairs had arisen through the necessity of combining intelligence with lightness of the individual body. A large planet, rather close to its sun, or swayed by a very large satellite, would be swept by great ocean tides. Vast areas of its surface would be periodically submerged and exposed. In such a world flight was very desirable, but owing to the strength of gravitation only a small creature, a relatively small mass of molecules, could fly. A brain large enough for complex "human" activity could not have been lifted. In such worlds the organic basis of intelligence was often a swarm of avian creatures no bigger than sparrows. A host of individual bodies were possessed together by a single individual mind of human rank. The body of this mind was multiple, but the mind itself was almost as firmly knit as the mind of a man. As flocks of dunlin or redshank stream and wheel and soar and quiver over our estuaries, so above the great tide-flooded cultivated regions of these worlds the animated clouds of avians maneuvered, each cloud a single center of consciousness. Presently, like our own winged waders, the little avians would settle, the huge volume of the cloud shrinking to a mere film upon the ground, a sort of precipitate along the fringe of the receding tide.

Olaf Stapledon, Composite Beings, Chapter VII: More Worlds, Star Maker

From those beginnings, shared minds flourished and became a staple of science fiction. Some are theoretical futures for humanity, as in Sturgeon's More than Human, Asimov's “The Last Question,” and Clarke's Childhood's End; others are alien intelligences, as seen in such influential works as Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Haldeman's The Forever War. Some of the most infamous shared minds in science fiction utilise cybernetic enhancement, as seen in the Daleks and Cybermen (Doctor Who) and the Borg (Star Trek).

Yet the Metal Monster predates even First and Last Men by a full decade – and the mind of the Metal Monster and the intelligence which grants life and movement to the countless Metal People are one and the same:

And at that very moment of pause a deeper tremor shook me, a trembling of the very foundations of life, the shuddering of one who faces the inconceivable knowing at last that the inconceivable—IS. For, abruptly, walls and floor and roof broke forth into countless twinklings! As though a film had been withdrawn from them, as though they had awakened from slumber, myriads of little points of light shone forth upon us from the pale-blue surfaces—lights that considered us, measured us—mocked us. The little points of living light that were the eyes of the Metal People! This was no corridor cut through inert matter by mechanic art; its opening had been caused by no hidden mechanisms! It was a living Thing—walled and floored and roofed by the living bodies—of the Metal People themselves. Its opening, as had been the closing of that other passage, was the conscious, coordinate and voluntary action of the Things that formed these mighty walls. An action that obeyed, was directed by, the incredibly gigantic, communistic will which, like the spirit of the hive, the soul of the formicary, animated every unit of them. A greater realization swept us. If THIS were true, then those pillars in the vast hall, its towering walls—all this City was one living Thing! Built of the animate bodies of countless millions! Tons upon countless tons of them shaping a gigantic pile of which every atom was sentient, mobile—intelligent! A Metal Monster! Now I knew why it was that its frowning facade had seemed to watch us Argus-eyed as the Things had tossed us toward it. It HAD watched us! That flood of watchfulness pulsing about us had been actual concentration of regard of untold billions of tiny eyes of the living block which formed the City's cliff. A City that Saw! A City that was Alive!

The idea of combining minds from many into one is fairly common – combining forms, on the other hand, is somewhat rarer. An early example is Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Eve with the Apple (1578), a nightmarish portrait of a woman whose face is composed of many human bodies. Another is Abraham Bosse's metaphorical illustration for Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), where government is visualised as a sword-wielding colossus formed by a multitude of citizens. Clarke Ashton Smith's titular “Colossus of Ylourgne” (1934) takes a necromantic twist, where an Averoigne sorcerer constructs a super-Frankenstein's monster from the corpses of hundreds of humans. A variation on this gruesome notion was later seen in the third season of Stranger Things. Frank Herbert's The Green Brain (1966) reveals an intelligent species of insect which can join together in army ant-like bivouacs shaped like humans – a horrific visual echoed in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987).

The 1960 Astro Boy story Space Snow Leopard arguably provides an antecedent for the “combining mecha” subgenre seen from Voltron and Gaiking to Getter Robo and Super Sentai (Starvengers and Power Rangers respectively), explicitly citing jellyfish, coral and sponges as examples of beings that exist separately but combine together to create a larger form. “The Metal Monster,” once again, predates them by years.

“As long as man is fit to rule...”

Dominion over all the earth? Yes—as long as man is fit to rule; no longer. Science has warned us. Where was the mammal when the giant reptiles reigned? Slinking hidden and afraid in the dark and secret places. Yet man sprang from these skulking beasts. “For how long a time in the history of earth has man been master of it? For a breath—for a cloud's passing. And will remain master only until something grown stronger wrests mastery from him—even as he wrested it from his ravening kind—as they took it from the reptiles—as did the reptiles from the giant saurians—which snatched it from the nightmare rulers of the Triassic—and so down to whatever held sway in the murk of earth dawn. “Life! Life! Life! Life everywhere struggling for completion! “Life crowding other life aside, battling for its moment of supremacy, gaining it, holding it for one rise and fall of the wings of time beating through eternity—and then—hurled down, trampled under the feet of another straining life whose hour has struck. “Life crowding outside every barred threshold in a million circling worlds, yes, in a million rushing universes; pressing against the doors, bursting them down, overwhelming, forcing out those dwellers who had thought themselves so secure. “And these—these—” the voice suddenly dropped, became thickly, vibrantly resonant, “over the Threshold, within the House of Man—nor does he even dream that his doors are down. These—Things of metal whose brains are thinking crystals—Things that suck their strength from the sun and whose blood is the lightning.

Perhaps the most sobering theme of The Metal Monster is not the notion of metal intelligence itself, or even of shared minds, but the idea that humanity's perceived dominion over the Earth may be superseded by beings beyond its own comprehension. Since the scientific classification of dinosaurs and other stupendous forms of prehistoric life, the place of humanity squarely on the top of the shining pyramid of Life on Earth has found itself shaken.

The conflict of metal against organic in science fiction: In addition to the likes of Hamilton's “Metal Giants,” Robert E. Howard alluded to the idea of alien intelligences using living metal as a superior vessel for their power to mere flesh in the Conan adventure “The Devil in Iron” (1934). Fred Saberhagen's “Without a Thought” (1947) presents not only the Robot Uprising, but the post-humanity universe, where the robot Berserkers escalate their war to the stars. Jack Williamson's The Humanoids (1949) offers a surprisingly fashionable machine menace in the sleek, black androids of the title. Arthur C. Clarke's Crusade (1958) culminates on a machine lifeform finding biological lifeforms so alien and monstrous that they embark on a campaign of “remedial action” - estimated to reach Earth in 2050.

Linked to this is the “slave uprising” motif seen in stories as superficially unrelated as Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness (1931), as well as more modern tales. The “Robots as Slave” motif was present since R.U.R., and the slave uprising that so often arises has permeated modern culture: The Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix, and any other media which have humanity and robots waging war. The Metal Monster, of course, differs from those stories in that the titular beings are slaves to no-one – if anything, tragic Norhala is their slave.

If The Ship of Ishtar is archetypal to the modern fantasy novel, then The Metal Monster bears many of the staples of robot fiction. The Metal Monster has elements from all across the field – intelligent metal creatures not created by humans, giant robot forms, smaller robots combining into larger ones, shifting from one form into another - and it was published one hundred years ago, on this very day.