The City of Gold and Lead
I could cut a long review short: 'The Tripod Trilogy' is a terrific sf series for the young ones, the darkest revelation of a post-tripod-conquest world is, obviously, that women don't matter at all. Where does that leave all the young men?
I read these books when I was 11 or 12 and I can't remember if I noticed the lack of girls then. I possibly was too busy having a crush on the strong-but-silent Fritz....
The story begins with Will losing his cousin Jack as a friend after the annual Capping ceremony takes place. When boys and girls are Capped they become men and women. They also no longer have any interest in "childish" speculation about the mysterious giant tripods that perform the ceremony and somehow rule the world. In the vulnerable time after losing his friend, Will meets a man posing as a vagrant - someone who, after capping, loses their wits and wanders freely across the country - who offers him the chance to run away across the channel to 'The White Mountains' where there is a community of free men.
Only men, mind you, only men. This can be justified by one thing - not stated in the text, the author presumes that the reader won't notice or care the specific denial of a chance at freedom for girls. Vagrants are only a small percentage of the Capped, and the majority of that small percentage are men. This is tactfully theorized to be the result of male brains being more prone to resist the dominating orders of the Cap. Women accept domination. This was written in 1967 and the author later went on record, not apologizing, to say that he wrote the books the way he did because it was understood that young boys don't want to read about girl heroes, but girls like reading about boys. That's totally reasonable....not.
I have all of these objections, and the problem increased as we got further away from the first book which mentioned Will and Henry's mothers, and the Comtesse, and Eloise; I still immensely enjoyed rereading these books. Christopher had a wonderful sense of pace and giving just enough description to keep the adventure and conceit afloat without bogging the story down with info-dumps. The baffling fact remains that there are no women among the free men at all, none mentioned. Perhaps they provide the sandwiches for the boys' picnic lunch at the start of 'The City of Gold and Lead'.
My 11-year-old self doubtlessly was horrified by the noxious green clouds and the oppressive artificial gravity of the city, not to mention the inhabitants, but I recollect dwelling on those kinky mask-and-shorts uniforms all the slaves wore....
One part of the series' appeal is how it covers so much ground in a very short time, Christopher practically uses montages in the second and third books to accelerate into the action. Will's character is fairly well drawn, he is a very believable whiny teenager. Henry, Beanpole and the "taciturn" Fritz are merely sketches, speculated about by Will, but the reader never gets to know much of them except by what their adolescent brains choose to add.
The books keep accelerating to a climactic finish with 'The Pool of Fire', but not before Will and Fritz have a long walking holiday through Europe and the Middle East stealing boys. Afterwards, Christopher presents a stern gloss on world politics with "The Conference of Men". In a bittersweet turn, the world is free once more, but women have either faded entirely within their glass coffins or are simply enjoying being mastered to much to participate.
John Christopher does an excellent job of making a world dominated by giant metal tripods seem real and creates a classic escapist story where intrepid pre-teens save the planet. If only he'd thought of the giddy trouble those young men could get into in a liberated world with no females.
How it All Began - Twenty years later, Christopher explains the origins of his homo-erotic fantasia in 'When the Tripods Came'
