“After a year in the White Mountains of hard training, the
resistance charges Will, Beanpole, and a German boy named Fritz, to infiltrate
a Tripod City by competing in a regional sporting exhibition. Will, a boxer,
and Fritz, a runner, win their respective contests, while Beanpole fails to win
in the jumping events. The winners are taken to the Tripod city in a pressurized
dome astride a river. Inside the city, the boys discover the Tripods'
operators, whom they refer to as the "Masters". Human males are
slaves inside the cities, while beautiful females are killed and preserved for
the Masters to admire. Slaves are furnished with breathing masks to survive the
aliens' atmosphere, but are rapidly exhausted by the stronger artificial
gravity and must therefore be periodically replaced. Although Fritz is abused
by his Master, Will is treated as a privileged pet by his. Eventually, Will's
Master reveals a plan to replace the Earth's atmosphere with the Masters' toxic
air to enable full control of the Earth.”
The City of Gold and Lead is a tense, lean tale and is much creepier
than the first book in the series. What worked was the whole concept of the
Masters and their bizarre city of gold. Christopher comes up with intriguing ideas,
even if he spends little time trying to fully explain them. The book still has
issues with women, and while I don’t want to make apologies for the authors
treatment of them, I’m still tend to accept that book was written at time when
the world still saw women as the happy homemaker, concerned only with trivial
things. They were not seen then as true individuals. Plus, again, this series
was directed at males so it can be expected a bit to believe young boy readers
would not like to see heroic women. There is also a suggestion that the boys
are not only verbally and psychically abused by the Masters, but they are also
molested by them. We also get a glimpse at how the Tripods overtook the world,
but once again, the details are slim. Maybe something more is forthcoming in
book 3?
A lot of this stuff was dropped in the 1985 12 episode TV adaptation,
with a bunch of new subplots and characters (females!!!) being added to offset
some of the more homoerotic and, let’s face it, weirder and kinkier aspects
that would’ve been hard to conceive on a TV budget back then. Which leads to
the fact that Disney has held the rights to this trilogy since 1997 and it
would be interesting to see how close a version of the book(s) they could do
now. I still think they would need to add a few new subplots and expand other
set pieces like the TV version did and they would probably change the gender of
either Henry or Beanpole (and why not Will as well?) to a women to entice the
female audience. And it’s obvious the technology of visual effects has greatly
advanced in the 30 years since this series aired, so that would be keen. There even
had been a suggestion that a film adaptation was coming in 2012, but that may
have been about the time of the authors passing and it was just hopeful
thinking.
Now onto the concluding book…
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