The science-fiction author John Christopher, who has died aged 89, was perhaps best known for the Tripods trilogy for young adults. The books (published in 1967-68) depict a world suffering under the control of aliens from a far star, who can survive in the Earth's inimical atmosphere only by moving around in deadly tripodal machines inside which their own atmosphere can be replicated. As a result, our world has reverted to a low-technology state, almost medieval in nature. A group of adolescents, not yet fitted with a mentally controlling "cap", bravely confront the menace of the Tripods. In the end, the results they achieve are not entirely what they expected.
The success of these books created a new career for the author, who for several years afterwards was recognised as a leading writer for older children. This was especially true in the US, where his books became perennial library favourites, and are still standard reading in many schools. In the mid-80s, the Tripods books inspired a popular BBC TV series.
He was born Christopher Samuel Youd in the village of Knowsley, near Liverpool. After his family moved to Hampshire, he went to the Peter Symonds school in Winchester; the area was often described in his novels. The second world war started at almost the same time as he left school, interrupting his writing career. In his five years in the Royal Corps of Signals, he saw action in Gibraltar, North Africa and Italy. He began writing as soon as he was out of uniform.
A postwar scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation gave him two years of financial independence, during which he wrote The Winter Swan (1949), the first of his three novels as Samuel Youd. He had previously published a few short pieces in American science-fiction magazines. Always hard-working, he then began writing in earnest for the science-fiction market and adopted the pseudonym "John Christopher". He published many well-received short stories, most of which were collected into volumes. His mainstream literary career continued in parallel: he averaged four novels a year, and was soon using a number of other pseudonyms. One of these was "Peter Nichols" and he belatedly offered a good-humoured apology to the playwright, even though Nichols's plays appeared long afterwards.
It was as John Christopher that he wrote the novel The Death of Grass (1956), his first real success as a writer and the one that enabled him to give up his day job. At the time, he was working in London for the South Africa-based Industrial Diamond Information Bureau, sometimes writing on a portable typewriter during his commute. The Death of Grass was published by Michael Joseph, the house that had made a success of John Wyndham's series of postwar science fictional "disaster" novels. He quickly found himself being compared with the somewhat older Wyndham, sometimes to his detriment, but more often than not to his advantage. The two men knew each other and had an amiable relationship, but they were never close friends.
In this period of the 1950s, both authors were writing novels that depicted a variety of global catastrophes, but these superficial similarities hid genuine differences. Youd repudiated, rightly, the tag of "cosy catastrophe", a phrase coined by Brian Aldiss. In The Death of Grass, there is a pleasing ruthlessness behind many of the actions. It tells the story of a world where all the graminaceous crops have failed. David Custance has a potato farm in Westmorland; his younger brother John wants his family to join him. After a few murders of innocent people encountered on the way up the Great North Road, the two brothers confront each other with automatic weapons. It ends badly ? there is nothing like that in The Day of the Triffids.
The American actor Cornel Wilde filmed the book in 1970 under the title No Blade of Grass. Youd made no effort to see it until one day it was shown on British television. He said later that he settled down with a glass of whisky to watch it, but was upstairs in bed by the end of the first commercial break.
Of the later John Christopher adult novels, The World in Winter (1962) and A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965) are notable. The former's opening sequence, in the icy reading room at the British Museum, is for economy of images and character motivation an almost textbook example of how to write that sort of thing.
Youd had an unusual way of working. He did a quick first draft of the opening chapter, but for the remainder typed a "final" version, with several carbon copies. When he had completed the book he would go back and redraft the first chapter. He used the method when he wrote his first Tripods book, The White Mountains (1967). Almost at once he came into the charge of an American publisher's editor called Susan Hirschman. She ordered a rewrite before she would accept it, so he gamely redrafted the first chapter. Then Hirschman said the middle sequence was no good, so he reworked that. More followed. Afterwards, he reflected ruefully that she had made the novel much better than it might have been, as she did for the novels that followed.
He lived for many years in Guernsey, but later returned to England, where he moved to Rye, East Sussex, and occupied the house once owned by the artist Paul Nash. I met him several times, as we were near-neighbours. He held strong opinions, but was a congenial and pleasant man. In 1946 he married Joyce Fairbairn, with whom he had five children, Nick, Rose, Liz, Sheila and Margret. After he and Joyce divorced in 1978, he married Jessica Ball. She died in 2001. His children survive him.
? John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd), science-fiction writer and children's novelist, born 16 April 1922; died 3 February 2012
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/06/john-christopher-samuel-youd
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