THE TRIPODS
Idon’t remember much sci-fi freaking me out as a kid. I didn’t like Doctor Who’s Vervoids for some reason, while the Malus prompted me to spend a year sleeping as far away from my bedroom wall as I could (to be fair, I was only five). The thing that really got to me was The Tripods, however – though I subsequently grew to love it. I first encountered John Christopher’s three-legged behemoths on BBC One, on Saturday teatimes in the mid-’80s. Watching giant metal machines trampling over the English countryside definitely had an impact but I wasn’t quite old enough to really get what was going on.
It was a few years later, when my mum and dad bought me John Christopher’s trilogy of novels, that they left a lasting impression. The first few chapters about 14-year-olds being taken away to have their free will removed via mind-controlling “Caps” really scared me, and after that I didn’t just avoid continuing the story – I hid the books away in a safe place to avoid any chance of looking at them.
When I finally plucked up the courage to go back, I was hooked. I loved the unmistakably hard sci-fi underpinnings of the story – alien Masters conquer Earth via mind control – being set against the pre-Industrial Revolution society the human race has reverted to, along with the always-a-winner hook that it’s down to kids to save the world. I particularly loved second book The City Of Gold And Lead, where lead character Will Parker goes undercover in the Tripod City. He’s refreshingly ordinary and out of his depth, and as such he’s much more relatable than many teen heroes. Reading them as an adult, the books are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short, but the story licks along at a hell of a pace. The downside is the uncomfortably dated gender politics of novels written in the mid-’60s – female characters barely feature, and while the strongest boys are taken to the Tripod City to serve as slave labour, the girls are simply preserved for eternity as museum exhibits of beauty. Still, work a bit on the equality issues, and The Tripods remains ripe for a quality movie adaptation. Seeing as it was passed over in the recent Hunger Games and Divergent-led rush to bring YA novels to the screen, its time may well have passed. It would be a shame, though, if we’re denied another chance to see if three legs really are better.
Richard don’t need no thought control.