Book 17 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

Before there was The Hunger Games, or Divergent, there was John Christopher’s The Tripods, a series of young adult novels about teenagers struggling against a powerful oppressive force in a science fiction dystopia. In one of my random searches on the internet, I came across a reference to the series, and was immediately intrigued enough to go read the first book for myself. That book is The White Mountains (1967), which is still in print today.

The book is set in the small English village of Wherton, which exists in a pre-industrial era akin to the Middle Ages. Overall, life seems pleasant and normal, except that at age 14 all children are subject to The Capping, a ceremony in which a metal cap is affixed to the child’s head for life. This capping is undertaken by a tripod, a titanic 60 foot tall walking machine that brings the child into its interior on Capping Day and releases them again as an adult in what is viewed as a rite of passage.

This has been the tradition for as long as anyone can remember, and 13 year old Will Parker is looking forward to his own capping. But his best friend is capped before him, and Will sees that his friend has fundamentally changed, with all his spirit and creativity seemingly taken from him. Will begins to have doubts, which are further increased when a vagrant comes into town. Vagrants are the result of the occasional failed Capping, in which the victim is then cursed to wander the land in a brain-addled state for the rest of their life. Will becomes intrigued by the vagrant Ozymandias, who tells Will the truth about the tripods and the capping — the caps are a way for the tripods to control humanity, which they conquered ages ago. With this knowledge, Will decides to make a dangerous journey to the south, to the White Mountains, which Ozymandias tells him is a refuge for free humans that are uncontrolled by the tripods. Along the way, Will will make new friends, learn secrets about the world before the tripods, and come into conflict with the monstrous tripods themselves.

The Tripods: The White Mountains is a young adult novel and a quite short one: I read the whole thing over the course of two evenings. It is a short, easy read but an entertaining and compelling one. It is well-crafted and the world building is fantastic. In a foreword to the modern edition, the author credits one tenacious editor for the quality: she demanded multiple rewrites of major sections of the book, and Christopher acknowledges that those revisions made the book so much better!

Christopher makes another amusing admission in the foreword. Reading the book, you might wonder what the tripods are: are they living machines that rebelled against their masters? are they machines piloted by aliens? are they the aliens themselves? The answer is that while writing the first book, Christopher had no idea himself! It is only in the sequels that he finally decided on the details of what the tripods actually are. This doesn’t weaken the narrative at all for the first book, however, as it is made clear that, regardless of their origin, the tripods defeated humanity ages ago and eliminated most of the population, leaving a small fraction to live on under their Capped control.

The tripods themselves are all the more terrifying for their mystery. They have definite agency and intelligence, and their pursuit of Will and his allies later in the book is quite nerve-wracking. Their massive size provides perfect symbolism of their oppression, as they are often towering over the human settlements, keeping a watchful eye (?) upon the inhabitants.

My guess is that the series is more well-known in the UK than in the US; in the UK, there was even a television adaptation of the first two novels that was done in the 1980s. In the 2000s, the novels were optioned for film, though it doesn’t appear that any progress has been made in actually making the films.

Young adult novels often get a bad rap for being to simple or childish, but good young adult novels manage to tell a sophisticated story in a way that is accessible to young and old alike. I found The White Mountains to be quite enjoyable and I will be picking up the next book in the series as soon as possible.