The White Mountains (Tripods Series #2) » (35th Anniversary Edition)

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.

Long ago, the Tripods—huge, three-legged machines—descended upon Earth and took control. Now people unquestioningly accept the Tripods' power. They have no control over their thoughts or their lives. But for a brief time in each person's life—in childhood—he is not a slave. For Will, his time of freedom is about to end—unless he can escape to the White Mountains, where the possibility of freedom still exists. The Tripods trilogy follows the adventures of Will and his cohorts, as they try to evade the Tripods and maintian their freedom and ultimately do battle against them. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, explains how the Tripods first invaded and gained control of the planet.

Publishers Weekly

Now in 35th-anniversary editions, John Christopher's Tripod trilogy, about a race of three-legged machines who rule the planet, appears with a new introduction from the author and revised texts. The White Mountains introduces 13-year-old Will as he flees the capping ceremony, a rite of passage in which the Tripods enslave their subjects by fitting them with metal headgear, and heads to Switzerland's White Mountains in search of the world's only remaining community of free people. The follow-up, The City of Gold and Lead, finds Will and friends living in Switzerland and training to overthrow the Tripods. But he must travel to the City of the Tripods, from which few return, to acquire vital information. In the final installment, The Pool of Fire, Will and friends fight against time to defend the human race from extinction, the end result of the Tripods' scheme.