Stanley G. Weinbaum 33 min read

'But it's iron!' the youth whispers, staring at the head Friar Roger Bacon has made. 'Iron without, skill within, my son,' the great man answers; 'it will speak, at the proper time.'

Stanley G. Weinbaum's story is a thoughtful hard-SF and social-SF tale framed by the legend of Bacon's brazen head. Sharp, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a story by one of early SF's brightest talents, reaching from a medieval friar's speaking automaton toward a meditation on the ideal, and the price of pursuing it.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

33 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).