‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in. The Mars aspect, he felt, was irrelevant. The disease starts in Asia and England is spared initially with an expectation that a treatment will be found in time. A mysterious plant disease after grass and subsequently all the grains derived from them. When I read this 1950s SF about a world starved and. 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. John Christophers The Death of Grass is a 50s era post-apocalyptic tale that is more whimper than a bang. So when I heard that John Christophers The Death of Grass had been reprinted by Penguin for the first time in years, I had mixed feelings. ‘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 not only of The Death of Grassbut also of a stream of novels (beginning with The Tripods Trilogy) in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction. 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.

Sam Youd was born in 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.’

John christopher's the death of grass