The White Mountains (The Tripods #1) (1967)
by John Christopher (AKA Samuel Youd)
On an Earth ruled by alien Tripods, Will and two other boys flee their village to avoid the “Capping” ceremony that would make them compliant servants.
They head for the Swiss Alps, where they’ve heard an organized resistance might be hiding.
The plot is a flight narrative—escape, pursuit, close calls, and hard choices—so the story sustains momentum even when it pauses for world building.
That world feels real: pastoral, tightly managed, and quietly wrong in the details people accept as normal.
The three boys read like actual adolescents, brave when they must be and petty when they’re tired or scared, learning as they go.
Will’s prickly, defensive first-person narration supports that immediacy, but it also narrows the view.
Because everything is filtered through him, the others can end up defined by his judgments more than by their own inner lives.
The Tripods can also feel inconsistent as threats; for supposedly overwhelming occupiers, they’re sometimes too easy for three kids to evade.
The ending is a bit of a letdown, an abrupt “to be continued.”
Still, as a lean opener to a trilogy with a genuinely unsettling central concept and propulsive pacing, John Christopher's book mostly delivers what it promises.
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| John Christopher (AKA Samuel Youd) |
Boys’ Life Magazine serialized the trilogy as a comic from May 1981 to August 1986, with art credited to Frank Bolle.
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| "White Mountains" (Chinese) |
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| "Cheyenne Dog" (Kurdish) I'm as confused about that one as you, but I defer to Google Translate |
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| "The White Mountains" (Danish) |
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| "White Mountains" (Persian) |
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| "The White Mountains" (Arabic) |
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| "The White Mountains" (Portuguese) |
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| "White Mountains" (French) |
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| "The White Mountains" (Spanish) |
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| "Last Base" (Finnish) |
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| "Tripod Monsters on a Course for Earth" (German) |
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| "The White Mountains" (Dutch) |
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