The Metal Giants

Professor Detmold believes the human brain can be duplicated in metal. His colleagues call the idea absurd, his university casts him out, and the public laughs at his claims. Hidden away in the West Virginia hills, Detmold continues his experiments until his artificial brain can see, learn, reason, and perform scientific work beyond its creator's abilities. Then Detmold is forced to leave it alone.

What happens next turns a scientific triumph into a nightmare. The artificial mind has no need for sleep, compassion, or human approval. It can solve problems with terrifying speed, build machines of its own design, and command servants powerful enough to crush a city. As gigantic metal figures begin appearing in the hills, Gilbert Lanier realizes that the strange reports may lead back to the friend who vanished four years earlier. By the time the truth becomes clear, humanity is confronting an enemy it barely understands and conventional weapons may already be useless.

The Metal Giants appeared in the December 1926 issue of Weird Tales, only months after Edmond Hamilton made his professional debut in the same magazine. The story belongs to the earliest stage of Hamilton's career, yet it already displays the enormous scale that would become associated with his fiction: spectacular machines, threatened cities, scientific breakthroughs that escape human control, and disaster unfolding across an increasingly helpless world.

Hamilton was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1904 and began appearing in Weird Tales with "The Monster-God of Mamurth" in August 1926. He became one of the magazine's most prolific contributors, publishing dozens of works there before expanding into Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and other science-fiction magazines. His later fiction included "Crashing Suns," "The Star-Stealers," the Captain Future adventures, and the novel The Star Kings. He also spent years writing comic-book stories featuring Superman, Batman, and the Legion of Super-Heroes.