Sacred texts

The booming came nearer and then, suddenly, we could see it over the roofs of the houses to the south: the great hemisphere of gleaming metal rocking through the air above the three articulated legs, several times as high as the church.

- Greg Dixon

“Its shadow came before it, and fell on us when it halted, two of its legs astride the river and the mill. We waited, and I was shivering in earnest now, unable to halt the tremors that ran through my body.”

I cannot now remember quite how old I was when I first read these sentences. But just like young Will Parker, the boy in the book they come from, I shivered in earnest at the arrival of the giant Tripod as I read “Capping Day”, the first chapter of The White Mountains.

Along with John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes and The Day of the Triffids and a few other sci-fi novels mostly written for children and young adults, John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire, were near sacred texts to me as a kid, books that both nourished my imagination and scared the bejesus out of me all at once.