A Blast From the Past: John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy
Long before YA fiction conquered the universe and millennia before the trilogy became the gold standard by which the world judges any given author, there lived Sam Youd, a British writer who worked under the pseudonym of John Christopher. Youd published The White Mountains in 1967, at a time when the United Kingdom was lurching away from the tight-laced, survivalist mode inherited from and necessitated by back-to-back world wars. Cue mods and rockers, Pink Floyd, the Swinging Sixties. Twiggy. Bowie. Cue a mind-set ready to dismiss the bleak past in favor of (in Christopher’s eye) an equally bleak future.
I first encountered The Tripods trilogy in the late seventies, and both my sister and I devoured the series more than once. In the first book, Will Parker, his loutish cousin Henry, and a whipsmart French lad, Beanpole, embark on a post-apocalyptic journey to the only haven they’ve ever heard of where humankind isn’t ruled by the fearsome Tripods, massive metal beings reminiscent of The War Of the Worlds. But in The White Mountains, the tripods have won: humanity has been enslaved through the use of “caps,” metal headgear installed without fail on a child’s fourteenth birthday. Will, Henry, and Beanpole are about to turn fourteen, and they are all too aware that after capping, their peers are never the same.
So book one is the journey. Book two, The City Of Gold and Lead, pits the boys, along with a stoic German, Fritz, against the creatures that operate the tripods, the Masters. Will and Fritz pose as slaves and infiltrate one of the three cities inhabited by the Masters.
