Sign-In
Cart
The City of the Copper Giants
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerScience Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 9 2026
Pages: 376
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.84 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Under the dunes, the city isn't dead. It's waiting.
A brutal sandstorm strips a remote desert basin bare, and an orbiting satellite catches something impossible: the curve of a massive copper hand reaching up from beneath the sand.
Archaeologist Dr. Amara Kessari is brought in to investigate what everyone assumes is an ancient monument. Alongside mechanical systems expert Dr. Victor Hsu, energy specialist Nadiya Belov, field engineer Hassan Rafiq, and security lead Kellan Ward, she expects stone, inscriptions, perhaps a lost temple.
What they uncover is nothing human in origin.
The copper hand is articulated-knuckles, wrist, and forearm descending into a buried structure. The metal isn't corroded. It's dark, burnished, etched with micro-grooves that shimmer under light like circuitry. When they locate an access panel in the forearm and open it, the desert exhales cool, preserved air.
Below is an entire underground city: wide streets of copper and stone, towers like ribs, bridges, rails, and mechanisms embedded everywhere. Nothing is decayed enough to be truly dead. A faint resonance hums in the walls, and Nadiya's instruments detect an energy field that behaves like electricity, but isn't.
This is not a ruin.
It's a system.
Deep within the city, a suspended spherical engine-the heart machine-beats out a steady, world-ignoring rhythm. The copper giants lying in silent rows in the plazas are not statues but humanoid machines, each one a limb waiting for a signal. Their smooth faces, marked only by a narrow vertical slit, echo a symbol carved across the city:
A circle, split by a line.
WATCH.
When a single misjudged activation pulse pushes the core out of low-power mode, the team learns the truth:
The city is a neural network of copper.
The giants are its limbs.
The streets, doors, and walls are its body.
The heart machine is its brain.
Buried, it slept. Powered, it acts.
As conduits flare, giants stir, and corridors reshape around them, the team realizes they are not exploring a dead civilization. They have been introduced as data into a machine designed to outlive its makers-and to keep optimizing its purpose, whatever that purpose once was.
The desert was never its prison.
The sand was only a lid.
Now the lid is shifting. The copper hand has moved. New surfaces are emerging miles away. Animals avoid the basin. Instruments fail. And the world above, hungry for energy and answers, is circling closer.
If the copper giants were never built to serve humans...
then humanity is simply the newest thing in the desert that can be measured, nudged, and processed.
The City of the Copper Giants is a tense techno-archaeological thriller about what happens when we dig too deep-not into our past, but into someone else's unfinished machine.
Also from
James, Michael
Sketchbook Brain: An Introduction to Complex Childhood Trauma and Brain Development
James, Michael
Romens, Allison
Paperback
Understanding CERN & The LHC: A Practical Guide to Particle Physics and Big-Science Labs
James, Michael
Paperback
Embedded Systems with Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and RP2350: Projects, TinyML, and IoT Applications
James, Michael
Paperback
Limitless Mindset: Unlock your potential by breaking mental barriers and embracing possibility.
James, Michael
Paperback
The Giant Who Was Afraid of Heights: A Fearful Giant. A Daring Therapist. An Adventure to Stand Tall
James, Michael
Paperback
Lyckan och Varandets Konst: En introduktion till Bhagavan Sri Ramanas andliga undervisning i filosofi och praktik
James, Michael
Paperback
The Valley of the Sleeping Kings: For Those Who Hear The Warning And Still Choose Whom To Save.
James, Michael
Paperback
Also in
Mystery & Thriller
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
Coffin Road: An Utterly Gripping Crime Thriller from the Author of the China Thrillers
May, Peter
Paperback
Sabine's Notebook: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Movie Tie-In Edition): Book 1 of the Millennium Trilogy
Larsson, Stieg
Paperback
The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
Big Little Truths: Reese's Book Club: A Novel: The Sequel to Big Little Lies
Moriarty, Liane
Hardcover
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River
Lawhon, Ariel
Hardcover