The novels
The Tripods Trilogy is a series of young adult science fiction novels written by John Christopher in 1967 and 1968. They are:
- The White Mountains
- The City of Gold and Lead
- The Pool of Fire
The setting
In the future, everyone on Earth lives a life roughly equivalent to that of the Middle Ages, with a horse-and-cart level of technology. Electricity and gunpowder have been forgotten. Most people live a rural or village life, and cities never get bigger than maybe 30,000 or 40,000 people. There are no more wars. However, the world is ruled by Tripods, massive metal walking machines over a hundred feet tall.
Each person in the world is fitted with a metal mesh cap on their head some time between their 14th and 15th birthdays, placed there by the Tripods. This cap is embedded into the flesh forever, and controls the brain. It forces a person to live this rustic lifestyle, forces them to love the Tripods as their natural rulers, and tells them what to think.
The only reason children are not capped is because 14 is about the age the skull stops growing. But children don't question the Tripods' existence or reign because it's simply the way the world is, and the adults in their lives encourage them to look forward to the day they will be capped, which is the rite of adulthood.
Everyone knows that people who lived long ago, "the ancients", had more advanced technology and lived in giant cities with millions of people. But the Tripods, through the caps, force people to believe that that was a time of war, sickness, hunger, and crime, and that things are so much better now that their lives are so rustic and the Tripods are in charge. The caps forbid people to be too inquisitive about ancient things, or to desire any ancient technology which the Tripods have deemed dangerous. The caps make people live their entire adult lives believing the Tripods know what's best for them, and that everything the Tripods do is for their own good. The old large cities have been entirely abandoned for over a century; the cap makes it taboo even to consider entering one, and people regard the abandoned great-cities of the ancients with dread. Many old place names have been forgotten.
Most importantly, the caps forbid people to wonder what the Tripods are or where they came from. People simply accept them, and their rule, in the same way they accept the forces of nature.
Sometimes a capping doesn't work right, and a person becomes insane after being capped. Either their mind is too weak and can't take the strain of being capped, or their mind is too strong and rebels until it's broken. Either way, such people spend their lives wandering as vagrants. Normal people pity vagrants, even while shunning them. But because the cap dictates absolute devotion to the Tripods, everyone accepts that vagrants are just something unfortunate which happens sometimes.
The general story (no real spoilers)
The main character is a 13-year-old boy named Will Parker, and the story is told in first-person form through his eyes. Will lives in a village, and is starting to have doubts about being capped next summer. But of course, there's no one he can talk to about his fears, and no alternative that he can see.
But then a vagrant calling himself Ozymandias arrives in Will's village. Ozymandias is not a real vagrant; he pretends to be insane, and the cap he wears is a fake. He poses as a vagrant so he can wander from place to place without arousing suspicion. Ozymandias tells Will there are uncapped people who live free of the Tripods' mind control, in a mountain range far to the south. These mountains are so high that snow lies on them all year round. Since no one knows the old place names any more, they are simply called the White Mountains.
Without stating it explicitly, the author lets the reader know that Will lives in England, and that the mountains in question are the Alps.
The free people in the White Mountains have sent Ozymandias, and others, out into the world to secretly recruit people to join their community. The only people they can recruit are young people on the cusp of adulthood who are near to being capped. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds are just old enough to have doubts, ask questions, understand answers, and make decisions. Ozymandias is the first person Will has ever met who doesn't treat the Tripods as a taboo subject, and answers his questions as best as he is able.
Ozymandias can't take him to the White Mountains because a boy traveling with a vagrant would attract a gigantic amount of attention and suspicion, whereas a boy traveling alone is merely a runaway. Also, Ozymandias is not finished with his journey, as he needs to save as many as he can. If Will wants to escape the cap, Ozymandias can only give him a compass, a map, and advice.
Will runs away and embarks on a journey to the White Mountains, and is joined by two other 13-year-old boys, Henry Parker and Jean-Paul Deliet. Will and Henry nickname Jean-Paul Beanpole, who doesn't mind the nickname.
The White Mountains tells the tale of their perilous journey south, to freedom. Since every adult in the world is compromised by the cap, the three boys have no one but themselves to rely on as they overcome one danger after another.
Although the author doesn't explicitly say so until the end of the trilogy, it's clear to the reader that the free people in the White Mountains live in the Jungfrau Railway Tunnel, a real tunnel built by the Swiss in 1912 to take people up to the Jungfraujoch.
In The City of Gold and Lead, the community of free people in the White Mountains has decided to stop being merely a band of survivors, and start being an active resistance group. And the first order of business, besides recruitment, is intelligence gathering, because still no one knows who or what the Tripods are or where they came from. The Tripods have a great city far away, but no one knows what's inside it or what goes on there.
The resistance also has a team of scientists. They are busy trying to relearn the science and technology which the Tripods have forced humanity to forget. They make excursions into the abandoned cities of the ancients in search of libraries.
Each spring, the Tripods take the winners of male athletic contests into their city to serve as slaves. These young men, around the ages of 14 to 18, are never seen again. But because they are capped, they go gladly, and their families are happy to send them, because the caps make them love the Tripods.
Our heroes from the first book, along with a new main character named Fritz Eger, put fake caps on their heads and try to win athletic contests so they can infiltrate the Tripods' city as spies. Since no one knows what's inside the city and no one has ever returned, they enter the city basically blind, knowing they'll have to rely solely on their wits not only to adapt, survive, and gather information, but somehow to find a way out again.
When our heroes enter the Tripods' city, we learn that the reason winners of athletic competitions are taken is that the environment inside the city is so harsh that only the youngest and fittest can survive it for very long.
Our heroes also learn that humanity's situation is more dire than they ever imagined.
In The Pool of Fire, the resistance uses the crucial information their spies bring back, and their new scientific knowledge, to launch a counteroffensive to throw off the domination of the Tripods and restore free will to humanity.
The trilogy covers a span of five years.
My love for this story
It's a classic tale of boyhood adventure. Like many other American fans who are men my age, I first learned of this trilogy by reading a comic adaptation in the pages of Boys' Life magazine in the 1980s, and it inspired me to read the books. When I picture the characters in my head, they look exactly like they were drawn in the Boys' Life comic because that's where I met them.
I adore this series, and I reread it every few years. I love the characters of Will, Henry, Beanpole, and Fritz, because I met them during that beautiful time in childhood when new stories are magical.
Teenagers save the world
These days, the concept of young teenagers saving the world in an adventure story is a common trope, but I think it was largely unheard of in the 1960s. Even if it wasn't unheard of, it was certainly more rare.
Generally, I have a low regard for this trope because it's very difficult to conceive of any realistic situation in which a young teenager can save the world when the adults cannot. (The prophecy trope, or the chosen-one trope, is a cliched crutch often used to get around this problem.)
But in this series, John Christopher constructs a world in which this trope is not just plausible, it's the only logical solution, and I admire the elegance of this construction. In the first book, the 13-year-olds are the heroes because the adults are compromised. In the second book, they're the heroes because only teenagers can win the athletic competitions and survive the city's harsh environment. In the third book, they're still the heroes because only the teenagers can re-infiltrate the Tripods' city and pretend to be slaves again, which they must do to launch their counterattack.
Lack of female resistance members
The entire story consists almost exclusively of male characters. John Christopher doesn't mention a single female member of the resistance. There are two occasions in the books in which the resistance sends people to recruit youngsters, but it's always explicitly to recruit boys. The concept of recruiting girls, who can also have doubts and questions and think for themselves, never even enters the characters' minds. The boys are the adventurers, the risk-takers, the leaders, the decision-makers.
I theorize this is because the books were written by a male in the 1960s. If you're too young to remember the 20th century, it's hard to describe just how ingrained gender roles were in the 1980s, much less in the 1960s. The concept of girls and women doing certain things was largely alien. As a boy reading the books in the 1980s, the lack of female resistance members was not something I noticed even in the slightest, as that was just the way things were. I was a boy reading about boys having adventures, and it was fun. Only as an adult did I notice the imbalance, and it is very striking.
This is not to say that John Christopher should have shoe-horned female characters into the slave scenes, as the Tripods took only the strongest males for in-story reasons. But there could easily have been female leaders, scientists, sentries, scouts, and guides. The political debates in The Pool of Fire could have had female participants.
In my fan fiction, I attempt to redress this imbalance somewhat.
John Christopher spoke about this issue in an interview.
The TV show
In 1984 the BBC created a TV show based on this story called The Tripods. It covered the first two books, then was canceled due to low ratings. Since I adore this story, I truly wanted to adore the TV show, as well. Unfortunately, it badly deviated from the books, and overall, I thought it was utter garbage in just about every way possible.
The prequel
In 1988 John Christopher wrote a prequel, When the Tripods Came, depicting how the Tripods took over the world in the first place (and incidentally, it's somewhat more inclusive of girls, even though most of the main characters are still boys). As a general rule, it's not as well-loved by fans. I like it, and I have read it twice, but for whatever reason, it doesn't hold the same place in my heart as the original trilogy.