Thread: The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher/Samuel Youd

Literature for young adults is divided between those who try to impart useful knowledge about life ahead and those who, having found life's byways ran more into stagnation than thoroughfares, want to project their neurotic sense of fear onto children. This book, despite being of the former sense, plays with the latter by addressing adult paranoia in a metaphorical form, much like cult movie They Live: what if our society was taken over by aliens who attacked our minds and not our technology?

In the contemporary or future setting of the book, the narrator and protagonist Will is a thirteen-year-old boy in a pre-technological land ruled by giant mechanical tripods. These outer space critters allow humans to conduct their affairs so long as every adult is "capped," or implanted with a mechanical brain control device, at age 14. As part two of a trilogy, The City of Gold and Lead describes the infiltration of an alien city on earth by Will and two cohorts. In the previous book, Will and his cousin Henry had observed how capping reduced creativity and made people automatons, and so had rebelled, destroying a tripod and heading to the French alps where they were free from oversight.

Read the rest here: The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher review

I loved these books when I was a teenager, and sought them out and read them again when I was in my 20's.

As a kid, the idea that adults were mindless drones and the only people who could save the planet were kids of my age was immensely attractive to me. The books were made into a TV series also.