The Tripods
The Tripods is a series of novels written by Samuel Youd (under the pseudonym "John Christopher") beginning in the late 1960s. The first two were the basis of a science fiction TV-series, produced in the United Kingdom in the 1980s (it was aired between September 1984 and December 1985).
The story of The Tripods is post-apocalyptic. Humanity has been conquered and enslaved by "the tripods", unseen alien entities who travel about in gigantic three-legged walking machines (the unsophisticated humans believe the walking machines themselves to be their living overlords). Human society is largely pastoral, with few habitations larger than villages, and what little industry exists is conducted under the watchful presence of the tripods. Lifestyle is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but artifacts from later ages are still used, giving individuals and homes an anachronistic appearance.
Humans are controlled from the age of 14 by implants called "caps", which suppress curiosity and creativity and leave the recipient placid and docile, incapable of dissent. The caps cause them to adore the tripods as their saviours. Some people, whose minds are broken (instead of successfully being controlled) under the pressure of the cap's hypnotic power become vagrants, who wander the countryside shouting nonsense.
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[edit] Books
[edit] When the Tripods Came (1988)
When the Tripods Came is a prequel written twenty years after the publication of the original "trilogy", and set in the late twentieth century.
In the second book of the main trilogy, one of the Masters tells the main character about the Masters' conquest of the Earth. The plot of the book follows the description of the conquest previously given. It is revealed that the Masters were afraid of the technological potential of Humanity and decided on a pre-emptive strike. Unable to defeat Humanity in a conventional war, the Masters use their superior mind-control technology to hypnotise part of Humanity through a television show called The Trippy Show, and then use the caps to control them permanently when they eventually land. The tripods then cap other people until the capped are in control in most places.
Like the narrator of the original trilogy, the narrator of When the Tripods Came is a young English boy, known as Laurie. As society slowly falls under the control of the Masters, he and his family escape to Switzerland, which adopted an isolationist stance to hold out against the initial invasion. Eventually it is invaded by France and Germany, who have fallen under the subjugation of the Masters, and the narrator is forced to flee into the Alps with his family as the Swiss are also enslaved by the Masters. Here, they establish the "White Mountains" resistance movement that features heavily in the original trilogy, and the book ends on a hopeful note.
[edit] The White Mountains (1967)
The story begins in a small village in England, perhaps a century after the Tripods conquered Earth. Will, the narrator, is 13, not quite a year short of the time when he will be "capped". His cousin, Henry, is one month younger. Although neither understands how the caps work, they know that the Capped are unquestioning and uncreative. They also know that some Cappings go wrong, creating Vagrants. Vagrants are generally harmless (but there have been exceptions) and wander from town to town. In Will's native England they receive basic care in their travels, with villages providing food and shelter.
Feeling uncomfortable with the idea of losing his creativity, Will decides to follow the advice of a mysterious Vagrant who goes by the name of "Ozymandias" and undertake a long journey to the "White Mountains" (actually the Swiss Alps, literally translated from the French Mont Blanc). He learns that Ozymandias is not actually Capped, but wears a false Cap taken from the skull of a dead man and molded to fit his own. Damaged, it has no effect on its wearer. He learns that if he reaches the titular White Mountains, he can join with other free men. Henry appears as he is preparing to leave. Although they have quarreled in the past, Will decides that it would be advantageous to allow Henry to travel with him.
After crossing the English Channel, Will and Henry join forces with a young, inventive French boy, Jean-Paul (Henry anglicizes his name to Beanpole, owing to his tall, thin stature, and he is so referenced for the rest of the series), and head for the White Mountains. The boys go through the abandoned remains of Paris, ruined during the Tripods' conquest, and finally arrive at the General Quarters of the human resistance. En route, mostly by sheer luck, Will destroyed a Tripod with old hand grenades (called "explosive eggs" by Henry) they had recovered from the ruins of Paris.
While written for a young audience — being rather short (under two hundred pages) — the book is swiftly plotted and filled with narrow escapes, except for a brief period during which the boys live at a manor owned by a wealthy French count. Will forms a strong relationship with the count's teenage daughter, Eloïse, and is heartbroken when she is chosen "queen of the tournament" at a festival hosted by the count, for the queen of the tournament must go off to serve the Tripods in their domed city (the Tripods, it turns out, actually have three cities: one in Germany, one on the Strait of Malacca, and one on the Panama Canal).
Will, Henry and Beanpole reach the White Mountains at the end of the book, and the final section is written from his point of view as a member of the group that lives within the mountains, planning an offensive against the Tripods.
[edit] The City of Gold and Lead (1968)
This book takes place a year after Will, Henry, and Beanpole arrived at the White Mountains. The Resistance now charges Will, Beanpole and a German boy, Fritz, now wearing realistic yet harmless caps, to infiltrate a Tripod city by competing in a sporting exhibition called "the Games" (very similar in nature to the Summer Olympics) in which the winners of the events are to be offered to the Tripods for service. Will, a boxer, and Fritz, a runner, win their respective contests, while Beanpole is unsuccessful in the jumping events.
Will, Fritz, and the other winners are taken by Tripods, which they discover to be machines operated by living creatures, to the Tripod city, which is located in a sealed, pressurized dome that sits astride a river. Inside the city, the boys are confronted with the actual aliens, which they refer to as the Masters. Human males are made servants for life inside the cities, while beautiful females are slain and preserved in museums of sorts, for the Masters to admire. The Masters themselves live under environmental conditions lethal to unprotected humans, and even with the breathing masks the slaves are provided with, the artificially increased gravity inside the cities slowly wastes them away; hence the sporting competitions to select the fittest and most resilient of the human stock to attend the Masters’ needs.
While Fritz is severely abused by his Master, Will's Master turns out to be rather liberal and benevolent. From him Will learns much about the Master's origins and habits, and eventually the Master trusts him so much that he reveals an upcoming operation in which the Earth's atmosphere is to be replaced by the Masters' toxic air, eventually killing off all life on Earth and enabling the Masters to assume full control of the planet. Will meticiously records every information imparted by his Master in a diary; however, one day his Master finds it and confronts Will about his atypical behaviour. Will is forced to kill him with a punch to a sensitive nerve cluster in order to maintain his secret.
With time running out, Will and Fritz prepare their escape via the river which flows through the city. With his mask sealed airtight, Will manages to escape, but nearly suffocates but for Beanpole's timely assistance, who has been waiting for the two hidden in the ruins surrounding the Tripod colony. The two wait for Fritz, but he does not appear, and in the end the coming winter forces them to return to the White Mountains without him.
[edit] The Pool of Fire (1968)
Will returns to the headquarters of the Resistance after several months in the City of Gold and Lead, where he and Fritz (who has escaped the city some time after Will and found his way back to the Resistance) travel to the Middle East and set up resistance cells with young boys who question the power of the Tripods. The resistance then ambushes a Tripod and captures a Master. Upon the discovery that alcohol has a very strong soporific effect on the Masters, the Resistance schedules simultaneous commando attacks on the cities. Will is one of the leaders of the attack on the European city.
By introducing alcohol into the city water system, the raiding party is able to incapacitate all of the Masters and ultimately to destroy the integrity of the city's sealed environment, killing all the Masters. The attack on the second city, in eastern Asia, is likewise successful, but the attack on the last city, in Panama, is not. The city bans human slaves to prevent a second infiltration. Next, the Resistance attempts an aerial bombing using its newly constructed aeroplanes. This attack also fails — because the Masters can disable the motors from a distance, presumably with an electromagnetic pulse. Fritz then leads an attack launched from air balloons, which succeeds, although at a terrible cost to the friends: after all the other bombs have been deflected away harmlessly by the city's impregnable dome, Will's cousin Henry lands his balloon and detonates his bomb by hand.
The world is liberated from the Masters' thought control and technology is rediscovered rapidly. The Masters' spaceship finally arrives, only to launch nuclear devices that destroy the remains of the cities, presumably to prevent the humans from reverse engineering the Masters' technology and using it to launch a retaliatory expedition against them, and once this happens the captive Master abruptly dies, presumably due to some innate ability to commit suicide. Humanity is saved, but the saga ends with a renewal of nationalist sentiments. The reader is invited by Will's musings to wonder: having mastered the Masters, can people master themselves? Will, Beanpole, and Fritz decide to band together to help unite the people again.
The title of the book refers to the mysterious power source of the Masters' cities, which is a crucial element in the attack on the first city.
[edit] Comic books
Multiple graphic adaptations have been produced, notably including:
- Boys' Life, The Boy Scouts of America magazine, serialized all three books in the trilogy from May 1981 to August 1986. Artist Frank Bolle drew the single page black and white proofs which were then inked by another person. The comics were a fairly accurate retelling of the original series' plot, although the characters are younger than the those in the original stories (to appeal to the target audience of scouts) and the text and illustrations are often very expository. One example is a panel showing Julius looking obviously very haggard, and to reinforce this, Will has a thought-bubble which reads "Julius looks so tired".
- In 1985, the BBC initiated BEEB, the BBC Junior Television Magazine, and started to present in picture strip form additional adventures of Will, Henry, and Beanpole on their way to the White Mountains, starting at some unspecified point during the fourth episode of the first BBC serial as the trio pass through ruined Paris, and then heading off at a tangent to the television version. From Issue 6, the boys were accompanied on their journey by a young woman named Fizzio, a totally original character who was introduced into the strip in order to increase reader interest for girls; an example of which was shown in Issues 13 and 14 when Fizzio becomes lost in a heavy rainstorm, being rescued by an elderly woman and taken to a remote cottage. However, it turns out that this seemingly kind woman is actually quite mad, seeing Fizzio as a replacement for her own daughter who was taken by the Tripods years before. Fizzio ends up being held against her will and threatened with death if she tries to escape, but gets away when her captor brings her a meal by the simple yet effective method of hiding behind the door of the bedroom where she has been imprisoned (luckily for Fizzio, her new mother has not thought to restrain her in any way!), then jumping out to ambush the woman and knocking her unconscious. Each issue, the strip consisted of three pages; the first two in colour and the third in black and white. The strip were drawn by John M. Burns. BEEB folded after only 20 issues (approx. 6 months) due to poor sales, leaving the four heroes in the middle of an adventure and – like the final episode of the then yet to be broadcast second season of the television series – on a cliffhanger ending that would never be resolved.
[edit] Television series
| The Tripods | |
|---|---|
 The Tripods Titles |
|
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Written by | John Christopher (novel) Alick Rowe (season 1) Christopher Penfold (season 2) |
| Directed by | Graham Theakston (7 eps) Christopher Barry (11 eps) Bob Blagden (7 eps) |
| Starring | John Shackley Ceri Seel Jim Baker |
| Composer(s) | Ken Freeman |
| Country of origin | UK Australia |
| Language(s) | English, French |
| No. of seasons | 2 |
| No. of episodes | 25 |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Richard Bates |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Broadcast | |
| Picture format | PAL (576i) |
| Audio format | Monaural |
| First shown in | United Kingdom BBC Australia Seven Network |
| Original run | September 15, 1984 – November 23, 1985 |
| External links | |
| Official website | |
The television version of The Tripods was jointly produced by the BBC in the United Kingdom and the Seven Network in Australia. The music soundtrack was written by Ken Freeman.
Season one of The Tripods, broadcast in 1984, which had 13 half-hour episodes written by the well-known author of many radio plays Alick Rowe, covers the first book, The White Mountains; the 12-episode second season (1985) covers The City of Gold and Lead. Although a television script had been written for the third season, due to a campaign against TV Sci-Fi by Michael Grade, the Controller of BBC1 at the time, it never went into production.[1]
The first season was released on both VHS and DVD. The BBC released Tripods - The Complete Series 1 & 2 on DVD in March 2009.[2]
The series introduced several minor changes from the book, notably the shape of the Masters and Tripods, which have tentacles (although the Tripods do have a mechanical claw-arm that they sometimes use); in the book, gravity inside the Golden City was increased artificially, which is not mentioned in the TV series; the introduction of "cognoscs", spiritual life-forms vastly superior to the Masters themselves; and more interesting main characters, including love interests for both Will and Beanpole. The original texts have almost no female characters at all. Youd was recently asked about this for an interview on Wordcandy,[3] replying that at the time of writing the series, it was generally accepted that girls would read books with boy main characters, but not vice versa. He also stated that he felt the addition of an entire family of girls to the TV series was somewhat "over the top".[3] The series is also notable for featuring non-humanoid aliens, which was uncommon at the time.
The death in a car crash of Charlotte Long, who played Will's love interest Eloise, occurred shortly before the start of transmission of the first season. For the second season, the role was briefly recast, with Cindy Shelley appearing as Eloise during a dream sequence.
[edit] Video game
BBC Enterprises licensed a video game adaptation of the TV series in 1985. It was designed by Watermill Productions and published by Red Shift.[4]
[edit] Film adaptation
Disney has owned the film rights to The Tripods since 1997. It was reported in 2005 that a cinematic version is in pre-production with Australian-born director Gregor Jordan signed on to rewrite and direct for Walt Disney's Touchstone Pictures label.[5]
The film version is expected for 2012, with no casting announced as of April 2010.[6]
[edit] DVD & soundtrack
A DVD release of the complete series 1 & 2 was released on 23 March 2009 (Region 2). A new soundtrack album, The Tripods: Pool Of Fire Suite by original composer Ken Freeman inspired by the unmade third series of Tripods was released at the same time.
Tracks/Titles in the Pool of Fire Suite CD:
- A Plan Of Action
- The Green Man and the Green Horse
- A Drink With Ruki
- The Pool Of Fire
- Summers of Winds
- Freedom Bubbles
- The Conference Of Man
[edit] References
- ^ ""The Tripods" in the making (vi)". Gnelson.demon.co.uk. http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/tripage/making6.html. Retrieved 2009-03-03.
- ^ "Tripods - The Complete Series 1 & 2 DVD". Amazon.co.uk. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tripods-Complete-1-2-DVD/dp/B000R21294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1269058509&sr=1-1. Retrieved 2010-06-18.
- ^ a b Wordcandy review of The White Mountains
- ^ The Tripods at World of Spectrum
- ^ Dunkley, Cathy (January 4, 2005), "Jordan to control 'Tripods Trilogy'", Variety (RBI), http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117915772?categoryid=13&cs=1, retrieved 1 January 2010
- ^ "The Tripods (2012)". Imdb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0441811/. Retrieved 2009-03-03.
[edit] External links
- The Tripods at the Internet Movie Database
- The Tripods at TV.com
- The Tripods at BBC Online
