Book Review: The Tripods quartet by John Christopher

The original trilogy consists of

1) The White Mountains (1967) 

Link: Tripods book 1, The White Mountains, by John Christopher: Amazon Kindle Store

2) The City of gold and Lead (1967)

Link: 

3) The Pool of Fire (1968)

Twenty years later John Christopher added a prequel,

4) When the Tripods came (1988)  

Many years ago, as a pre-teen, I found a copy in a school library of "The White Mountains" which was the first volume of John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy.

I read it avidly, then located the second and third books at the city library and read them avidly too.

In 1984 and 1985, two seasons of a television series were broadcast which covered the first two books of the trilogy. Sadly a third season which would have covered the events of the third and concluding volume of the story, "The Pool of Fire" was cancelled, proving that state corporations like the BBC are capable of making decisions as bad as the most notorious cancellations by private companies like Fox, Disney and Paramount.

However, I did re-read the whole trilogy at the time and found it as compelling as an adult as I had when I first read it as a boy. I have now also read the prequel. Let's start with "When the Tripods came."

Prequel: When the tripods came

The book is set in an indeterminate future, but probably in the last years of the 20th century not that many years after the book was published in 1988. One of the teachers at the school Laurie, the main character, attends was himself a schoolboy at the time of World War II, and the British army is still using "Challenger" tanks at the time of the Tripod invasion although that could cover quite a long period - the Challenger One main battle tank was new and state-of-the-art at the time "When the Tripods came" was written, but as this review is published 38 years later, the Challenger 3 is replacing the Challenger 2 and is expected to be in service until the 2040's if drones do not make tanks obsolete first.

From our viewpoint the book is set in a parallel timeline as the author did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union a few years after it was published.

The tripods are war and exploration machines used by an alien race, which walk on three metal legs: the aliens originally land three, one in Britain, one in America and one in Kazakhstan "in the Soviet Union" (Oops!)

The narrator of the story, a teenage boy called Laurie, and his friend Andy happen to see the Tripod which the aliens land in Britain. I'm not going to say too much about the opening chapter of the book to avoid spoiling the story, let's just say that the initial tripod attack is terrifying to those who witness it but it fairly rapidly becomes clear that humanity is not entirely defenceless and the aliens' technological superiority is not nearly great enough to overcome their numerical and logistical disadvantages and to conquer an entire planet by direct force.

The possibility that the aliens could try to get mankind to surrender by threatening to bombard the planet from orbit using nuclear or kinetic strikes is never discussed - perhaps it is assumed that they did not want to damage the planet they meant to conquer.

Instead the Tripods found a different and more insidious way to conquer Earth then overt force, at least initially: a method, indeed, which seems far more credible in today's social media age than it might have when the book was written, at a time when the internet was relatively new.

Laurie, Andy and Laurie's family try to flee from Britain and other countries which are coming under Tripod control,  seeking refuge in the Swiss mountains ...

Book One: The White Mountains

All three books of the main trilogy are narrated by Will Parker, who at the start of "The White Mountains" is a thirteen-year-old boy.

In Will's time almost all surviving humans live in small rural villages or what they call cities but have no more than at most 30,000 inhabitants. Few humans travel far from their homes. Those who do notice  that in places there are the ruins of enormous cities built by the ancients in what they are told were the "Black age" before the Tripods. It is never stated how long the Tripods have ruled the earth, but it appear to be several generations: perhaps about a century. 

At the age of 14 the mark of adulthood is to be "capped" - to have a metal framework fitted to your head, integrated with the flesh and bone. Knowing that he is due to be capped next year, Will is increasingly concerned that those who are capped seem to lose aspects of their personality and ability to think for themselves.

For a small number of people the capping goes wrong and they lose their minds, and become vagrants, wandering beggars who may be fed by capped villagers out of pity but are not trusted or taken seriously.

One such vagrant, who sometimes calls himself Ozymandias, befriends Will - who gradually comes to realise that this wandering madman is not what he seems.  Ozymandias tells Will that the caps are intended to keep humans subservient to the tripods. But there are a few free humans: and if Will wants to avoid becoming the slave of the tripods, he can run away from home and join the free - if he can make a dangerous journey to the White Mountains far to the south, on the other side of the narrow sea which separates England from France.

With his friend Henry, and soon with a French boy nicknamed "Beanpole," Will embarks on that dangerous and terrifying journey ...

Book Two - the City of Gold and Lead

Every year the Tripods hold a competition to select a few of the best and brightest young men and women to serve them in their great city.

The resistance sends Will Parker and another boy called Fritz to take part in  that competition, hoping that they will be able to find out about the tripods by serving inside the city and somehow get the information back.

They know the mission will be difficult and dangerous. To find out just how dangerous and difficult you'll ave to read the book, because I'm not ging to spoil it ...

Book Three - the Pool of Fire

Will Parker has returned to the resistance with the devastating news that the alien masters of the tripods, who breathe air different to ours, are planning to change Earth's air to match their own. (It is never stated in any of the books exactly what the aliens breathe, but it is poison to us ad our air is poison to them. It reads as if the reducing element in their air might be chlorine rather than oxygen.) In four years the alien starship which brought them here will return with the necessary equipment to start changing our atmosphere and incidentally wipe out most terrestrial life including the human race.

Free humans have that long to destroy the three alien cities - or face extinction ...

Commentary.

All four books are memorable, well-written, and quite frightening. I personally found the Tripods and their alien masters believable - although this was not a universal opinion.

During a discussion show about the TV series, one of the most distinguished Science Fiction authors of the day, Brian Aldiss, criticised the Tripods books on the basis that the Tripod aliens don't have infrared sensors, asking how one could take seriously  an interplanetary invader who doesn't have infrared?

Brian Aldiss wrote brilliant books but I'm with John Christopher on this. Until; they have had time to develop a widespread interstellar empire or a trade network which span many types of world, a civilisation is going to start with the kinds of both natural senses and technological ones which fit the conditions on their home planet.

On earth what we call "visible light" is the most common type of radiation so that's what we see by, while echolocation by sound, and the use of infrared  and radar can all be useful so we've developed those technologies and some species such as bats and cetaceans use sonar. Who is to say what technology might or might not work on a world with much higher gravity and a very different atmosphere?

I'd say the possibility that technologies known to us might not be a subset of the aliens, but that each might have things the other lacks is quite likely.

The books is a product of its' time. How the tripods' alien masters reproduce and whether they have genders is never discussed but by 21st century standards the Tripods have pushed humans into traditional gender roles and their treatment of their human slaves is sexist. That does not make the book itself sexist since these are the actions of the villains and there is no suggestion that the heroes or the author endorse those gender stereotypes and certainly not the crimes against women perpetrated by the villains.

Overall these are good stories and I recommend them. I would also recommend that the books of the original trilogy should be read in chronological sequence. 

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