Customer Reviews

The Metal Monster (Classics of Science Fiction)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When Dr. Walter T. Godwin sets out to study a rare flower in Tibet, he has no idea of what adventures await him. Meeting old friends in the secluded Himalayas, he quickly finds himself fleeing from the descendents of a lost Persian Empire city right into the domain of a seemingly omnipotent metal intelligence. This extraterrestrial metal intelligence is made up of a collective composed of living cubes, pyramids and spheres. Even stranger, the intelligence seems to work through a human woman of great beauty, Norhala. This metal intelligence is beyond anything that Godwin and his compatriots can even understand--is humanity about the be replaced as the ruler of the Earth?

OK, this book is a little bit odd at times. He keeps bumping into old friends in the Himalayas, there are descendents of the Persian Empire (a whole city, in fact) that no one knows about, and the ending is something of a deus ex machina. However, for having been written in 1920, this book is quite good! Though the storyline needs a fair amount of suspension of disbelief, it is quite entertaining. Also, when the metal intelligence forms shapes out of its cubes, pyramids and spheres, I couldn't help but think that modern special effects would turn this into quite an excellent movie.

So, overall I do recommend this book.

The highlight of this book is Merritt's very imaginative concept of a metallic form of life made up of an enormous number of smaller components that can reshape, divide, or combine as needed. Much of this book is spent in an extended exploration/description of this concept. Merritt, writing in 1920, gets very high marks for imagination, anticipating current nanotechnology. This is worth four stars all by itself.

The story does not really do justice to the concept, unfortunately. Merritt's dominant female personality, Norhala, doesn't really fit. Merritt seems to include her merely because Merritt is obsessed with such personalities and they feature in most of his books. The scenes against the long lost Persians likewise seems to be grafted on just to give the story some action to offset pages and pages of exposition. The resolution comes right out of nowhere with little foreshadowing.

Merritt's descriptions are very poetic - the man had a vocabulary - but ultimately can't be visualized by the reader. This doesn't make the story hard to follow, fortunately, but the reader is pretty much left to his own devices as far seeing the story in his mind's eye.

Modern readers will also be put off by the slow pacing that was the fashion when the story was written. Although the book justifies its classic status modern readers would be better starting out with Merritt's "The Ship of Ishtar".

Recommended for readers willing to overlook serious flaws. It will reward some patience.

I read this book in the early seventies while living in Spain. It has left a lasting impression on me and I consider it a lost classic. The plot has been outlined already so I won't get into that, but the metal icky bugs in this story are unique and I've never read anything like it since.

After I read this story, I kept noticing a huge sign on a building in Madrid that read, Metal Mazda. I know that has nothing to do with this book, but it always reminded me of Metal Monster and every time we drove into Madrid, there it was! I wish I still had the book somewhere as it warrants a second read.

If you want a unique sci-fi story, this is it!

If you happen to be a student in temporal lobe epilepsy here is an example for you. After a "long trek adventure" beginning, this novel lapses into such a prolonged account of person preoccupation with hues of almost unimaginable variety, and forms impossible to imagine or keep track of, that even an enthusiast can barely endure. The male characters (with featureless personalities) and a female (similarly nondescript) float along endlessly on a platform with a hapless donkey. Meanwhile, the riders are surrounded with a blizzard of glows, corpuscles, glimmers, this, that and the other things - until one is left asking like Superman, "What th..?" Merritt does describe rather well a personal projection of his Anima in the novel: Norhalla - too bad she was metallic. Compare Haggard's projection of his Anima, She. As with most popular writing read it for comparison of its short comings with material actually worth reading. I have most of Merrits's other novels. Merritt is interesting as peculiar brain function rather than as a source of literary value.

This is one of the worst of Merritt's books, though Black Wheel wasn't his fault--it was completed after his death. Although Metal Monster has some interesting ideas, Merritt failed to bring any of them to life.