The prequel to John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, When the Tripods Came (1988) was a nice addition to a series that all ready has a classic status in juvenile SF. The original three books told of a world dominated by an alien race and how the humans regained control of the Earth. In WTTC, Christopher goes back to before the arrival of the Masters and how they took over.
John Christopher (aka Christopher Samuel Youd) is a member of the old British SF community, rubbing shoulders with Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard and John Wyndham (all of whom are mentioned in Clarke’s Tales From the White Hart). Christopher’s books create such world disasters as another Ice Age in The Long Winter, earthquakes in The Ragged Edge and famine, in the classic, No Blade of Grass (aka The Death of Grass). He has written many books for young readers including the Tripod series.
The British school of Science Fiction to which Christopher belongs was very much influenced by H. G. Wells. The tripods of this series are logical extrapolations from Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). The disaster angle of his older, adult works has been replaced by a “what if” motif of after the invasion, though this new prequel lets us see that invasion, which is not death rays and London falling, so much as a soft takeover that may be less Wells but not less convincing.
In the new book, Laurence and his family escape to Switzerland when strange spaceships come to Earth and take over. The alien masters use a metallic brain in-plant called a “Cap” to control all human thinking. Though the family survives, the aliens succeed in claiming the entire Earth.
The White Mountains (1967) takes place decades later. The Masters run the planet, capping all adolescent boys and girls. Three boys, Will, Henry and Jean-Paul, escape the cappings and search for the legendary free people in the White Mountains.
The City of Gold and Lead (1967) follows Will, Henry and Jean-Paul’s attempt to win an athletic competition which will get them into the Masters’ strange city, where they will work as slaves. Once inside, they must escape with valuable information for a revolt. Christopher has created a fascinating alien race with logically worked out environs and method for taking over another planet.
The Pool of Fire (1968) ends the series with the revolution that ends the Masters’ rule and stops their plans to convert the Earth to an alien environment. All ends happily, but not without growth in the three main characters.
The Tripod books are just as easily read by adults. They are written in Christopher’s fast-paced adventure style prose. While the books lacks, at times, a deeper, psychological level, they are fun and intriguing, enough so that they were adapted for television in England in the 1980’s, a fact that Christopher pokes fun at in his latest book.
The author has chosen to remedy one of the faults in the original series: the lack of any strong female characters. The new book is told from the male perspective but features some gutsy women, like Martha, Laurence’s grandmother, who is not one of those cozy grannies but a hard, realistic businesswoman, the kind of gram Heinlein would have created. Characters like Martha add a modernity that the old series lacked.
Also added to this new entry are references to the science fiction films of the ’70’s. Christopher even gets a chance to parody his own Tripod adaptation with “the Trippie show”, a combination live-action/cartoon that the Masters use to brain-wash less discriminating tv viewers. The Trippie show, like its real-life counter-part, is popular world-wide. Perhaps more relevant to today is the fact that viewers willingly accepted the new caps as a way of enhancing their viewing and gaming experience. In this way the invaders got a toehold on brain control. With our technology on the cusp of computer-brain implants for leisure the message becomes even clearer.
I recently discovered that the series was also adapted as a comic book in Boys’ Life. The serial ran as single page segments from May 1981 to August 1987. The series was penciled by Frank Bolle. The BBC Junior Magazine did their own adaptation in 1985 with art by John M. Burns.
