Read The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) Online
Authors: John Christopher
The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods)
Preface to the Anniversary Edition
To Rose, Liz, and Nick,
with love
Writers are borrowers and thieves. Computer analysis has recently revealed that the best of us all, William Shakespeare, based two of his early plays on works by his then more distinguished contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Because he
was
Shakespeare, his versions turned out far better than anything Marlowe could have achieved. And as Shakespeare’s genius matured, he no longer had a need to borrow; other writers borrowed from him instead.
It wasn’t quite like that in my own case: I stole from a much better writer than myself. All I can offer by way of extenuation is a) I didn’t know I was doing it and b) I did my best to add a little something of my own.
• • •
I’d written
The White Mountains
in a spirit of venturing into new and uncharted territory. I was far from sure it would prove acceptable, even to the English publisher who’d asked me to write it; let alone to a wider audience. I also realized that, if it was approved, I was going to be leaving loose ends which would need another book to sort out, although I had no notion of having embarked on a trilogy.
The chief loose end lay in the nature of the Tripods: Were they intelligent machines, or awe-inspiring carriers of mysterious aliens? I had actually used Tripods before in an adult science fiction story (thankfully forgotten), without even wondering where I’d got them from. I now realized where I’d picked up the idea: H. G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds.
This was an almost incredible example of amnesia. As
a boy, I had been fanatically devoted to science fiction—principally through the medium of American pulp magazines, but I had also worshipfully devoured all the scientific romances of the great H. G. Wells, of which
The War of the Worlds
is among the most notable. And possibly the most famous: in the thirties Orson Welles made extraordinary use of the book to terrify radio listeners across a large tract of North America into thinking the story was real.
If I
had
understood the source of the Tripods earlier, I would never, of course, have used such a device; but with
The White Mountains
finished and on its way to publication, I realized I was stuck with the borrowing. So I started trying to make it my own.
On the face of things, tripods do not seem a particularly sensible way of getting around. They are large and they stand awesomely tall, but they’re clumsy and relatively slow-moving as well. I thought about my illustrious predecessor, and realized that he too had been struck by the visual image—undeniably a powerful one—but had not given much thought to more practical considerations. His tripods had been vehicles for intelligent, spiderlike Martians. But why on earth would an arachnid species use something so improbable, and so impractical? They would have done better, for instance, if they had replicated their own body structure and deployed eight-legged, crawler-type vehicles in their invasion of planet Earth.
And why would they develop these stiltlike vehicles on a planet which astronomers had assured us was desertlike and largely flat? It made no sense. But then I recalled that there had been something that was reminiscent of Tripods in our own history: the stilt men of Landes.
Landes is a region of southwest France fronting the Bay of Biscay, now drained and cultivated but before the nineteenth century a marsh-filled swampy region. Sheep grazed there on the hummocks of grassland between the swamps, and their shepherds needed a better way of looking after them than by trudging around in the muddy wetlands. So they developed stilts, on which they could stalk about tending their flocks, carrying long sticks to reach down to the ground below (the third leg of the Tripod?). Even today, at the town of Dax, famous for its mineral springs, there are annual demonstrations of stilting—not just walking on stilts, but dancing and engaging in sporting events. Stilt walking was also developed in Belgium, and in the Marquesas islands in the South Pacific.
So perhaps, I speculated, these aliens had come from a swampy planet. And perhaps, unlike Wells’ Martians, they
had
been into the idea of body replication. They had invented Tripods rather than stilts . . . because they themselves were three-legged? I was beginning to get a grip on things.
How would a Tripod move—which leg went first, and which followed? Try it yourself, walking three fingers across a table: it isn’t easy. And it was a question that cropped up seriously in 1983 when the BBC made a television series based on the books. The producer, Richard Bates, put the problem to me, and I airily told him not to worry. A revival of the MGM movie based on Wells’ book was to be shown on television the following week; all we had to do was watch that, and find out. But when we did, we found that the film producers had chickened out of the difficulty—instead of tripods they featured flying capsules, supported by invisible force beams. So I handed on the problem to Arthur C. Clarke (before he became Sir
Arthur). He said that while it was indeed difficult, there should be a solution, but it would be a pretty abstract one, involving the utilization of higher mathematics.
Daunted by this, I went back and took another look at
The White Mountains,
only to find that I’d actually already worked it out for myself but forgotten about it. The only reasonable means of progress for a Tripod is by way of a twirling motion, a kind of spiraling advance. So if Tripods twirled, maybe so did the three-legged Masters. And perhaps they had three eyes, to take in a continuously shifting perspective—two more steps on the road to getting things right.
Coming from a hot steamy planet, the aliens would want to maintain a similar environment in their citadel strongholds on Earth. In addition, the massive scale of the Tripods suggested that their planet was larger than ours, with a higher gravitational force—they would need to reproduce that, too. I was beginning to envisage what their headquarters might look like: a walled, domed city with a gleaming gold exterior and an artificial gravity within that would relentlessly wear down any humans brought inside. A city of gold and lead.
Even when we first came
to the White Mountains, in summer, the upper reaches of the Tunnel looked out over fields of snow and ice; but at the lower end there were rocks and grass and a view of the glacier, stained brown with mud and dripping into rivulets that ran down to the valley, far far below. In September there was a fall of snow which did not lie, but in the early days of October the snow came again, more heavily, and this time remained. The grip of winter tightened around us, and it was to be more than half a year before those white bony fingers unclenched.
