Book 19 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.

Last month, I read the first book in John Christopher’s classic young adult science fiction series The Tripods, and was sufficiently intrigued and entertained to pick up the second book, The City of Gold and Lead (1967).

The first book in the trilogy, The White Mountains, leaves the origins of the tripods and their true nature mysterious, and the novel is more of a post-apocalyptic road trip story than a full science fiction tale. The second book steps fully into science fiction, as the protagonist goes on a mission into one of the mega-cities of the tripods in an attempt to find information that can eventually defeat them.

As a bit of a recap: the first book introduces us to Will Parker, a thirteen year old boy who lives in a small village with medieval-era knowledge and technology. The village, and the whole world, are ruled and supervised by the tripods, three-legged machines that watch over humanity and “cap” them at age 14. The capping is a process by which a metal cap is affixed to a young person’s head, making them completely subservient to the tripods and uninterested in learning anything more about the world. Will is nervous about his upcoming capping, and a chance encounter with a member of a secret resistance makes him decide to escape. He, and some friends he makes along the way, head on an adventure south to the White Mountains, where the resistance is housed.

In an introduction to The White Mountains, John Christopher admits that he hadn’t decided on the nature of the tripods when he wrote the first book: are they aliens, rogue robots, or something else? This had the great side effect of making them even more mysterious. In the second book, however, Christopher finally has to explain what they are: the tripods are the machines of an alien race that has conquered humanity in order to colonize the Earth, and they few humans as nothing more than slaves to be molded to their whims.

Will learns this in The City of Gold and Lead when he trains for, and is appointed for, a secret mission to one of the cities of the tripods. The tripods annually take the winners of an athletic contest in Germany as servants in their city, and the resistance decides that this is a perfect opportunity to infiltrate the city and learn as much as possible about the tripods, their capabilities, and their plans. In the process, he and another young man will become slaves of the Masters of the tripods, and must survive brutal conditions in the city, gather as much information as possible, and escape: all while maintaining the appearance of being capped and brainwashed.

Christopher makes another amusing admission in the second book, and one I was wondering about. Anyone who knows science fiction will think that the three-legged tripods bear a striking resemblance to those in H.G. Wells’ classic War of the Worlds. In his introduction, Christopher acknowledges that he had certainly read War of the Worlds when he was young, but somehow that inspiration was subconscious, and he didn’t even remember Wells’ book and only realized the similarities after The White Mountains had come out! Christopher is clearly mildly embarrassed by this, but he really doesn’t need to be: pretty much all fiction has some sort of inspiration, consciously or not, in earlier work, and The City of Gold and Lead quickly distinguishes itself in the paths it takes.

I am quite astonished in hindsight how well the lore of the tripods works, considering Christopher hadn’t really thought through any of it while writing the first book. For the second book, as he recounts, he had to think seriously about who the Masters were, what their motivations were, what their physiology was, why they pilot tripods, and even how the tripods move! The latter was a particularly interesting challenge, because we are all familiar with how two-legged and four-legged creatures walk, but there aren’t any natural examples of three-legged locomotion. Christopher even consulted with Asimov to brainstorm some ideas, and that led to some wonderful fleshing-out of the tripods and their Masters. Why three-legged tripods? Because the Masters have a physiology that is three-fold symmetric themselves. Why are they never seen outside their tripods in the first book? Because Earth’s atmosphere is toxic to them and they cannot be exposed to it without protection.

The odd title The City of Gold and Lead gives a hint at another fascinating detail of the Masters’ physiology. They come from a world where gravity is significantly stronger than Earth, and so their cities have an artificially-boosted gravity to match. The “lead” of the title refers to this strong gravity, while the “gold” refers to the color of the buildings in the massive domed city. The reason that the Masters choose their slaves from the strongest young men in the countryside is because the strong gravity causes their bodies to break down quite rapidly, and only the strongest can last long enough to be useful.

It is interesting that the motives and morals of the Masters are ambiguous in the first book, for reasons we have mentioned. In the second book, Christopher makes it clear that there can be no reasoning with the Masters, as they view humans as slaves at best, creatures that are inferior and disposable. Even the kindest Master encountered in the book sees the humans he controls as pets, to be treated good or bad at its whims.

The details of the city are just really well thought out and, as I have said, draw the story solidly into the territory of science fiction. It is fascinating to get these details through Will’s eyes, as Will has a medieval understanding of the world and cannot even fathom how most of the Masters’ machinery works. We also eventually learn about how the Masters came to rule over the entire Earth, and that revelation is also quite compelling. Will also learns about the Masters’ overall plan for humanity — and discovers that he may have hastened humanity’s doom with his own actions.

Character building is very good in the book, as well. Will Parker is an impulsive, hot-headed youth — even the leaders of the resistance recognize that these traits could endanger the mission. In fact, Will’s temper leads him into peril several times during the story, and it is often up to his friends to rescue him. Curiously, Will’s mission partner Fritz is intelligent, cool-headed, and mission focused, and his reliability puts a spotlight on Will’s own character flaws.

Young adult novels are often viewed, by people who don’t know better, as oversimplified childish diversions. In reality, the best of these novels manage to tell sophisticated stories in a way that can appeal to and be understood by adults and young adults alike. The Tripods series clearly falls into that category for me, and I’m looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy.