Synopses & Reviews
On an Earth where the Tripods -- huge, three -- legged machines -- have ruled for as long as anyone can remember, thirteen-year-old Will harbors fears about the Capping ceremony he will soon undergo. Capping marks the transition from childhood into adulthood, but it also has a more sinister meaning: It is the Tripods who attach the metal headpieces to people's skulls, and once Capped, a person is forever a slave to them. As Will learns the truth, he realizes that he must escape while his mind is still his own. With two companions, he begins a journey across Europe to find the stronghold of the last free people in the world -- in the White Mountains of Switzerland.
Thirty-five years after its original publication, we are proud to offer this anniversary edition of The White Mountains, featuring a new preface from John Christopher, as well as the author's fully revised text, available in the United States for the first time.
Synopsis
To commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the classic Tripods trilogy, we are proud to offer, for the first time in the United States, the fully authorized, revised texts of the three books. In this gripping adventure series, Earth has been taken over by Tripods -- huge, three-legged machines with who knows what inside -- and it is up to a small group of people to free it.
In addition to the revised texts, these anniversary editions have striking jacket art and new introductions by John Christopher, which describe his beginnings in young adult literature and the origins of these books.
About the Author
John Christopher (Sam Youd) was born in England in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm. His early years were spent in Lancashire and Hampshire. He left school at sixteen to work as a local government clerk until being called up for army service in 1941, and spent the following four and a half years with the Royal Corps of Signals, in Gibraltar, North Africa, Italy, and Austria.
On leaving the army he renewed a teenage ambition toward being a writer, and in 1947, on the basis of an unfinished novel, won an Atlantic Award, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to devote himself to writing for a year. He tried to justify the award by writing serious novels, but subsequently also wrote detective thrillers, light comedies, novels based on cricket, and science fiction, to which he had been passionately devoted in his early teens. After several adult science fiction novels, he was asked to write for the young adult field, and ended up writing sixteen books in that genre, including The Guardians, The Lotus Caves, Dom and Va, Empty World, and the Sword and Fireball trilogies, as well as the Tripods trilogy. Following a BBC television series in 1984 based on the Tripods books, he wrote a prequel, When the Tripods Came, explaining how it all came about.
Sam Youd is a widower with five children and numerous grandchildren, and lives in Rye, in the county of Sussex, England.