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Author Description John Christopher was one of the pen names used by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17707952.Sam_Youd" title="Sam Youd" rel="nofollow noopener">Sam Youd</a>.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17707952.Sam_Youd" title="Sam Youd" rel="nofollow noopener">Sam Youd</a> was born in Huyton, Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.<br /><br />As 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.’<br /><br />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.<br /><br />He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, <i>The Death of Grass</i> (today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with <i>The Tripods Trilogy</i>.<br /><br />‘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.’<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The Mars aspect, he felt, was irrelevant. ‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in.’

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