The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher

The City of Gold and Lead is the second book in John Christopher’s 1960s Tripod trilogy. But it is the sharing of adversity that knits men together. One enjoys friendship most when times are good, when the sun shines and the world is kind. Some of us, one at least, must penetrate the City of the Tripods, study them, and bring back information. We must know more before we could hope to fight them successfully and there was only one way to get that knowledge. We knew almost nothing of the Tripods-not even whether they were intelligent machines or vehicles for alien beings. ‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in.’įor we-or some of us-were to conduct a reconnaissance. The Mars aspect, he felt, was irrelevant. In an interview towards the end of his life, conversation turned to a recent spate of novels set on Mars and a possible setting for a John Christopher story: strand a group of people in a remote Martian enclave and see what happens. ‘I read somewhere,’ Sam once said, ‘that I have been cited as the greatest serial killer in fictional history, having destroyed civilisation in so many different ways – through famine, freezing, earthquakes, feral youth combined with religious fanaticism, and progeria.’ He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, The Death of Grass (today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with The Tripods Trilogy. Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies … In all he published fifty-six novels and a myriad of short stories, under his own name as well as eight different pen-names. Samuel Youd was born in Huyton, Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.Īs a boy, he was devoted to the newly emergent genre of science-fiction: ‘In the early thirties,’ he later wrote, ‘we knew just enough about the solar system for its possibilities to be a magnet to the imagination.’

The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher