I've been slowly doing a read-through of the Appendix N authors (gamers know what I mean by that). Since I'm an obsessive completist, I'm not just reading a few titles by each author; I'm going all-in. I'm reading just about everything they wrote. It's taken me a while, but I've finally reached the 1920s. I've read a bunch of Burroughs, including a lot of Tarzan books; some Lord Dunsany, and I've just dabbled in some early Lovecraft.
But I've also encountered the king of fantasy fiction from the first half of the 20th century: Abraham Merritt. I just finished a read of The Metal Monster, originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920, in eight parts. Fortunately, I was able to find online copies of all eight magazines where the story originally appeared, so I got the full book rather than the edited, truncated version that was later published (and which became the 'standard' text for Merritt readers in subsequent decades).
It's a hefty read, coming in at just over 100,000 words, which seems like a lot for a pulp novel. The Conquest of the Moon Pool was similarly large, published the year before. Merritt was a prolific writer when he wanted to be.
The book marks the return of Dr. Goodwin, the narrator of the Moon Pool and Conquest. In this one, he's back in the thick of the action, by which I mean that he basically stands around watching things happen. Merritt certainly has incredible imagination, but so far, his heroes, or at least the narrators, are more passive observers than men of action. Perhaps that's why characters like John Carter and Conan resonate more strongly with readers; we want to be the guy doing stuff, not the guy watching the other guy do stuff. It would be like playing a D&D game and watching the DM's favorite character do all the heroic stuff while the PCs are relegated to sidekick status.
In The Metal Monster, Goodwin is joined by Dick Drake, son of an old science acquaintance, and the Ventnor siblings, Martin and Ruth. Like Conquest, Goodwin doesn't get the girl; the other guy does. In this case, Drake and Ruth fall in love, while Goodwin stands by admiringly. Again, watching the other guy do stuff. Can you imagine John Carter watching while Kantos Kan put the moves on a reciprocating Dejah Thoris? I think not.
But really, the presence of the small group is incidental to what's going on in the story; in fact, they simply stand and watch the entirety of both climactic battles, having no participation whatsoever, save as prisoners in the first one. The story is a showcase of Merritt's astounding imagination; he's got self-replicating robots that feed off the sun's energy (by what is essentially a solar core tap, sucking the sun's energy from 93,000,000 miles away), living in a hidden valley next to a city of descendants of Xerxes' Persian army from twenty-five centuries ago.
His descriptions are gorgeous, and the action is intense...but passive. Goodwin and his companions spend most of their time worrying about how they're going to get out of the situation they're in, and how to stop the Persians from ravishing Ruth. But it's Norhala, the human 'queen' of the intelligent metal creatures, who does all the work. In fact, the power of the metal beings is so utterly beyond human capacity even today, that there is literally no way for humanity to avoid destruction if these creatures so choose.
There are only a couple of ways to end this story without humanity getting wiped out like victims of the Borg, and Merritt picks one of them. It's a majestic scene, one that Hollywood would spend a lot of money recreating on the screen, but again, it's bystander time. And that is a bit disappointing; the 'heroes' have zero agency in the story. It's almost like a D&D adventure from the 1990s, where the entire plot is laid out, and your characters end up watching the rest of the world act around them, rather than being the agents of change. In fact, the only real reason for them to be present is to incite the conflict between Norhala and the Persians.
Still, the real star of the book is, as mentioned, Merritt's imagination. There is a literal robot nursery where baby robots are raised. The robots are not at all humanoid; they are polygons. Cubes, pyramids, hexagons, spheres...lots of them. They are a precursor of D&D's modrons, actually, although their numbers are significantly higher.
It's been mentioned elsewhere that Merritt popularized the idea of the adventuring party as gamers know it, where a group of disparate people with varying skills come together to fend off a terrible menace. This is very noticeable in Conquest, where Goodwin is joined by Larry O'Keefe and Olaf Huldricksson in his quest to find Dr. Throckmartin and his party. In this one, the Ventnors, Drake and Goodwin have different skills and purposes in the story; Goodwin speaks Persian, which is a useful skill since that's the language Norhala knows. Drake is a good shot and has a keen scientific mind (he figures out what happened at the end from observation and his scientific knowledge of electricity). Ventnor doesn't have much to do except exposition when he is nearly fried by the metal beings, and somehow gets in touch with their robotic consciousness. Otherwise, he spends a good chunk of his time being unconscious. And Ruth...well, this was written a century ago. Women weren't action heroes, and I'll leave it at that.
Overall, it's still a good book, thanks to Merritt's fantastic visual writing, but it leaves something wanting in the end. It's nowhere near the level of Conquest, but it's certainly a good way to stretch your own mind as to what you can expect from fantasy fiction. Because it is fantasy, despite the robots (which are never named as such, since the word didn't exist in English yet). It might not be magic, and Drake provides a scientific explanation at the end, but make no mistake, this is fantasy. And Merritt is still the King.
As for my own writing, I've plugged my fantasy and science fiction books many times here. I would like to bring some attention to my anthology, which covers a bunch of different genres, A Universe of Possibilities, available in ebook format at an Amazon location near you. Support indie publishing, because it's the wave of the future!
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