21 August, 2001
The "Tripods" Trilogy:
This review was posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. You can read the discussion here.
It's the future, and the Earth has been taken over by giant metallic tripods. Humanity has been returned to an essentially rural existence; all the great cities have been destroyed. The Tripods control humans via metallic "caps" placed on their heads at the age of 14, which induce obedience.
Will Parker is a 13-year-old boy, living in a small English town. Due to be Capped in a year, he is nervous and ambivalent about it. One day, he meets a vagrant calling himself Ozymandius. Ozymandius, Will discovers, is not Capped. He is one of a band of free humans living in The White Mountains, far to the south. He tells Will the truth about the Tripods, and convinces him to run away from home and join the resistance. He does this, accompanied by his cousin Henry (who Will does not get along with very well), and a French boy, Jean-Paul, who they meet on the way. The first book, The White Mountains, chronicles the journey of Will, Henry, and Jean-Paul's journey to the free humans' refuge. In the second book, The City of Gold and Lead, Will and another boy infiltrate the City of the Tripods to gather intelligence about humanity's enemies. The third book, The Pool of Fire, describes the final assault against the alien menace.
I remember seeing these books in the library when I was about 12, the target age for these novels. Even though I was getting into SF around that time, I didn't think these novels looked very interesting at all. I recently skimmed the first book while helping a friend move, and decided that they looked interesting enough to read. So, I read 'em. They're good boys' adventure novels, good enough that an adult can really enjoy them.
Christopher does a great job of describing the post-invasion Earth in such a way that the reader can easily identify things which the characters themselves don't recognise. Like railroads and handgrenades. And Paris. The description of the alien city in The City of Gold and Lead is similarly well-done. The third book is the weakest of the three. It doesn't really have a single coherent story, it's more of a series of adventures which serve to wrap up the tale. I do see why the books didn't interest me as a kid, though. I said they're boys' adventure novels, and that is so much the case that it challenges one's willing suspension of disbelief. There are only two or three female characters in the entire trilogy, and they are all in the first book. This is particularly odd, because the colony of free humans has supposedly existed for over a century, ever since the initial invasion, but they didn't start recruiting the children of the Capped until relatively recently. They must have reproduced themselves somehow! The series includes a lot of outdated gender stereotypes. For example, all boys feel apprehension about getting Capped, but few girls do, like girls are naturally meek or something like that. So, I don't think it would be very appealing for girls of the target age.
But, as an adult, one can understand that the books were written in the old days, when men were men, and women need not apply, and one can enjoy the story on its own terms.