Christopher’s protagonist is Will, an impulsive young English boy, less than a year from his own Capping. Tripod dominance is ensured by Caps, cranial implants inserted into all adults when they reach adolescence: these ensure unquestioning obedience to the Tripods and whatever controls them. Dating is difficult as ‘our’ civilisation has been subjugated by that represented by the Tripods, enormous walking machines, and life has returned to a near-feudal level.
The Tripods Trilogy isn’t apocalyptic but post-apocalyptic SF – the exact date of the setting is never made clear, but it seems to be, at earliest, the very late 21st century. So he was perhaps an odd choice for what’s essentially a YA book series, but he brings to it his usual bleakness of vision and strength-of-characterisation. In Wyndham’s books you never really feel the end of the world bite – in Christopher’s, you absolutely do. Christopher, prior to this point, was probably best-known as a writer of actually pretty grim catastrophe-SF, somewhat in the same style as John Wyndham, but without the geniality or some of the interest in philosophy. The Tripod books were written by John Christopher in the late 1960s. This series doesn’t seem to be nearly as well-known these days as it deserves to be – the TV adaptation is thirty years old now, and the film version is apparently stuck in Development Hell – but having recently revisited it I find it still has much to commend it. When it comes to euphoniously-named book series, you can’t do much better than the Tripods Trilogy, and this isn’t even the most impressive thing about it.
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