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195 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1967
Thinking of this, I saw how good things could be meaningless in isolation. What value did courage have, without a free and challenging mind to direct it?I am doing a reading challenge this year, and one of the items is a book from your childhood. I remember really liking the Tripod series as a kid, so I decided to re-read the first book, The White Mountains. It lacks the depth and complexity of the better contemporary juvenile fiction, but for a 9-year-old, this would be solid alien invasion/government conspiracy stuff. Recommended for kids or for a nostalgia trip.
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:There's nothing like a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel to take your mind off current ills, providing that what's described doesn't approach too closely to reality. That's the case with the first of Christopher's Tripods trilogy, which seems to describe a time which may be in the 2060s, roughly a century after when the novel was first published. There are echoes of H G Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) along with aspects of medievalism which are reminiscent of Keith Roberts' alternative history novel Pavane (published a year after The White Mountains) and Peter Dickinson's dystopia in The Weathermonger (also 1968), but Christopher's novel has a quality all of its own.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
'... Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies ...'