Christopher's tendency to resist easy solutions to the moral dilemmas he dramatizes makes it particularly hard for him to contrive definitive endings to his science-fiction novels. At the end of The Tripods Trilogy the young heroes find that the forces of freedom are deeply divided. The peace that has been won at such great cost promises to be more difficult to preserve than it was to gain.

Christopher presents the reader not with the easy consolations of a fairy tale, but with the bittersweet realism of speculative fiction.

Christopher's plot line in The White Mountains is suspenseful yet straightforward. The nature of the tale requires Christopher to describe extraordinary events, bizarre creatures, and nightmarish locales, but he treats such subject matter in a surprisingly understated, matter-of-fact way. The White Mountains is essentially a quest story, featuring many of the traditional motifs of the romance novel: the...