THE METAL GIANTS (3)
By:
June 13, 2026
Edmond Hamilton’s The Metal Giants, which features an atom-powered metal brain that constructs a rampaging army of 300-foot-tall robots, first appeared in the December 1926 issue of Weird Tales. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9.
Lanier arrived in Stockton early the next morning. His face was drawn and haggard, as it had been since he first read a certain humorous newspaper dispatch, and in his mind was an immense perplexity, a vague, chilling fear.
Until late in the afternoon he tramped wearily through the town, asking in all quarters the same question: “Do you know of anyone named Detmold who lives in or around Stockton? A tall, strong man —” And from all he questioned he got no trace, until he happened into the office of a small trucking and hauling company.
None there knew anything of Detmold, but they had done some work for a certain Foster, who corresponded exactly to Lanier’s description. This man lived several miles from the city, in a northeastern direction, and had hired them to haul some boxes from the railroad to his home, an old farmhouse. A mighty bad road it was, too, and this Foster had been very particular about the moving of his stuff. Yes, they could direct him to the place. You went out such and such a concrete road, and turned up a rutty lane, very steep….
By the time the sun hung poised above the western horizon, Lanier was already ascending that steep, twisted road. More than once he glanced back at the city below, a city bathed in the golden afternoon sunlight. Its streets were filled now with workers returning home from the mills, tired and blackened, calling out to the friends they met for the latest news on “that Morgan critter,” as they termed it.
A quiet serenity, a dreamy, contented peace pervaded Stockton, contrasting with the tense excitement of the preceding night. In a thousand homes, the evening meal was being prepared and the day’s gossip related, in the west the sun sank lower and lower, and all around, beyond the encircling hills, death marched toward the city with crashing, giant strides.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.