Introduction

Although I love the Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher, I want to point out a few flaws it has, because they bother me.

This contains spoilers.

A Tripod's height, and the balloon battle over the third city

The biggest flaw of the trilogy is John Christopher's description of a Tripod's height and of the attack on the third city using balloons.

In The White Mountains, after Will destroys the Tripod and its tentacle loses its grip, Will narrates, "I was three times the height of a tall pine."

Google gives varying answers about how tall a tall pine is, but it's easily over 100 feet, so a conservative guess means Will was just over 300 feet above the ground. If so, then when he reached the ground, he was traveling about 100 miles per hour.

John Christopher states that Will didn't go kersplat because he was holding onto the tentacle, and it viciously jerked his arms and stopped him just feet above the ground. But the key term here is stopped. It's the stop that kills you. If you're holding onto a rope as you fall and you reach 100 miles per hour, and the rope suddenly comes up short just before you reach the ground, you're still going to go kersplat.

Now, if Will fell at an angle so that he swung on the tentacle back and forth, until the tentacle lost momentum and he could alight on the ground, that would be plausible. But Will was so near the Tripod's dome that I don't think he would have fallen at a shallow enough angle to make this happen.

We could say that Will, panicking, had no idea how high he really was, as height looks differently from above as it does from below. Or we could say that pines are just shorter in England. Either explanation makes much more sense, because in chapter 1 of the The White Mountains, Will says the Tripod is "several times as high as the church." I consider a typical village church to have a steeple no more than 50 feet high, and if we interpret several as three, that makes the Tripods 150 feet tall. Personally, I feel this is more realistic, as a 300-foot-tall Tripod somehow doesn't seem practical.

But this doesn't resolve the narrative problem with Will falling, for if he only fell 150 feet, he still came to a sudden stop at 67 miles per hour. This is simply not plausible in the slightest.

In my head, the only way I can accept that Will lived through this ordeal is that the tentacle fell at enough of an angle that it swung back and forth, slowly losing momentum, with Beanpole and Henry trying to catch and slow him each time he went by. This is not what John Christopher describes, but what John Christopher describes doesn't work. And my idea barely works, because it presents a new problem. For Will to fall at enough of an angle for the tentacle to swing instead of jerk him to a stop, he would have had to start falling from a point away from the dome, yet he was close enough to the dome to throw a grenade into it. So my idea only works if, just before the tentacle loosened, it extended again, taking Will further from the dome before he started falling, and there's no real reason it would have done this.

Now let's talk about the final battle at the end. This is all part of the same topic because it still concerns height.

In The City of Gold and Lead, as Will is being taken into the European alien city, John Christopher states, "The Wall was more than three times as high as the Tripods." I think it's safe to assume that each city has an identical layout and size, so the American city's wall would also be more than three times as high as the Tripods.

Three times as high as the Tripods is 450 feet. John Christopher says, "more than," so let's round that up to 500 feet.

There is a green crystal dome above the wall. John Christopher doesn't say how high it extends, but being a dome, I think it's safe to assume it would be at least half as high again as the wall. This makes the city 750 feet tall, minimum.

In The Pool of Fire, talking about dropping the bombs, Will narrates, "...we needed to make our drop from a height of just under a hundred and fifty feet [over the city's dome]." This means the aeronauts are aiming for a point 900 feet above the ground.

As the balloons approach the city, a Tripod easily hits some of them with its tentacle. But the balloons are 750 feet above the Tripod, and I refuse to believe its tentacle is 750 feet long. And remember, this height is the most conservative estimate.

Put bluntly, a city dwarfs a Tripod, and the balloons are higher than the city. This ratio holds no matter how tall the Tripods are. Therefore, no Tripod could possibly have attacked their balloons.

This makes the final battle completely fall apart for me because I cannot envision it. In one sense, John Christopher writes the battle as if the balloons are approaching 150 feet above the dome, but in another sense, he writes the battle as if the balloons are approaching at the same level as a Tripod, and both cannot be true.

One slightly possible explanation is that the aeronauts approach the city near the ground so that fewer surrounding Tripods will see them, then rise to 900 feet only when they near the city. But this still doesn't make sense, because when the Tripod advances to attack them, all they have to do is rise to 900 feet immediately and they're safe.

If this story ever gets made as a big-budget action film, and if the director is at all conscientious of these logistical problems, this is the biggest logistical problem they'll have.

Reigniting the pool of fire does not affect the caps

When the infiltration team shuts off the pool of fire, all electrical systems in the city die and the Capped are released from mind control.

When the infiltration team reignites the pool of fire, all electrical systems in the city come back to life but the caps do not re-establish control of their victims. Not only does John Christopher fail to explain this discrepancy, he doesn't even mention it, and I find that stunning.

Fritz and Will should have thought of this before they reignited the pool. Even if there is a plausible explanation for the caps not reasserting control of their victims, Fritz and Will could not have known it would happen that way. They would have assumed the caps would reassert control, and taken steps to deal with it.

Fritz's ability to think through a problem logically, and his ability to see a problem before it happens, is usually fantastic, but it utterly fails here.

How did the resistance plan to deal with Tripods outside the city?

When the infiltration team destroys the city, all the Masters in the Tripods away from the city die in sympathy.

But the resistance had no idea that would happen. They must have expected all Tripods caught outside the city to retaliate, or perhaps cause a staggering amount of random carnage and damage before running out of air. If the resistance had nothing more than a vague hope, that's fine, but the author should at least mention it, because it's really important.

The Parker surname

Will and Henry are cousins through their mothers, who are sisters. So why do Will and Henry have the same last name? On the face of it, this means their mothers were surnamed Parker, and their mothers refused to take their husbands' surnames, and Will and Henry took their mothers' surnames instead of their fathers'. In this religious and rustic society, I have a hard time believing that.

The likelier explanation, by far, is that their fathers are also related, but more distantly than their mothers. That's to be expected in a small village. Will and Henry are cousins through their mothers, but could also be (for example) second cousins through their fathers, who are both surnamed Parker.

Not naming characters

My final problem with the Tripods Trilogy is a stylistic one: John Christopher sometimes didn't name characters who played prominent roles.

Naming a character helps them come alive to the reader. It's an introduction.

In particular, I feel very strongly that the author should name every member of the infiltration team in The Pool of Fire the moment we meet them, in the dugout by the river. As it is, when we learn Mario, Carlos, and Jan's names, we've already read about them and their work for twenty pages. That's like working in the same room as a coworker for a month without knowing their name. During those twenty pages, they are simply nameless resistance members #1, #2, and #3, sharing this danger side by side with our main characters, and it bugs me deeply. The author never even names the sixth member of the team at all (in my fan fiction, I name him Nicolas).

If you're going to title a chapter "Six Against the City," at least name all six, and do so at the outset.