A FEW WORDS TO MY IRANIAN READERS

It is nearly forty years since I was approached by an Iranian publisher who wished to publish the Tripods trilogy in Farsi. Subsequently there were great political changes in your country, and I assumed that the books had gone out of print. It was with great surprise that I learned, a few years ago, that not only were these books still in print in Iran, but several others also had also been published in translation. This information was provided by Mr Hossein Ebrahimi (known to me as Elvand), the skilled translator who had translated and published many of the books, although not the original three. Elvand later did me the honour of coming to visit me in England, and very kindly presented me with a Persian carpet which I deeply treasure.

Now, four decades after the first, there is a project for a new version of the Tripods in Farsi, which is to be undertaken by a new and equally talented translator, Mr Mehrdad Tooyserkani, in whose gifted hands – as I can tell from his letters to me – it will be very safe. He has asked me to write a few words for the new edition, and I am happy to do so.

I could not have imagined that four decades after that first publication the books would not only be still in print but indeed popular enough to justify this renewal. It is a sobering thought that my first readers will by now have grown from early youth into middle age – may have had children of their own and even grand-children.If any of them should pick up a copy of the new version, I hope it may bring back happy memories, as it does to me.

The trilogy is about a world of the future in which mankind is ruled by an alien species. These aliens are not necessarily wicked, merely self-regarding, seeking their own ends without regard to the needs or rights of others. They treat human beings as more or less useful slaves, imposing direct personal control through Capping around the age of puberty. My story tells of a handful of boys who struggle to avoid being Capped and aim to join a resistance group of free men in the Swiss Alps; and who subsequently infiltrate one of the alien cities and learn how to fight against them and destroy them.

What they are fighting for in the first place is the right to use mankind’s god-given reason, to make rational judgements rather than to be subject to blind authority – in this case alien, but it would be equally true of unthinking human authority. They aim at a future of peace and freedom, and when, having destroyed the power of the aliens, they find humanity slipping back into old bad habits of selfish conflict, they set themselves to combat that too.

The conclusion is hopeful.There can be no end to the struggle for freedom, but the act of struggling is a freedom in itself.

Samuel Youd

2006-9-30

اين وب‌پيج آخرين بار در تاريخ 2008/03/12 روزآمد يا ويرايش شده است.