<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

During the 1960s, British writer John Christopher(April 16, 1922–), penname of Christopher Samuel Youd , built his career writing near-future disaster novels. He ravaged the world with a global plague in No Blade of Grass (1957, aka The Death of Grass), pushed it into the next ice age with The Long Winter (1962, aka World in Winter), and shook it to pieces in The Ragged Edge (1965, aka A Wrinkle in the Skin). His next major project consisted of a young adult trilogy about the invasion and conquest of the world by aliens, apparently the Martians of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, who in this case are capable of controlling the minds of adults, leaving teenagers to save the day. The original trilogy, The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire, was published in 1967–1968 and was partially filmed for the BBC. Christopher later added a prequel, When the Tripods Came (1988).

Christopher had been writing short SF since the late 1940s, but without attracting much attention. After the 1950s, he rarely wrote anything other than book-length works. His subsequent adult SF novels were less than successful. The Possessors (1964) is essentially a low-key horror novel in which parasitic alien invaders menace a small group of people. In The Little People (1966), another isolated community is menaced by what at first appear to be nasty leprechauns, which later turn out to be the product of genetic engineering. Pendulum (1968) was the best of these, a look at a future in which London is succumbing to the reign of violent gangs and anarchy.

Although his adult novels were indifferently received, his books for adolescents did much better. A trilogy, consisting of The Prince in Waiting (1970), Beyond the Burning Lands (1971), and The Sword of the Spirits (1972), is set in the years following a nuclear war. Society has reverted to a quasi-medieval state, and the young heir to a throne has to deal with usurpers and intrigues.

Several of Christopher's other young adult novels are set in similarly fractured civilizations, including Empty World (1977) and A Dusk of Demons (1993). His most impressive later work is the two-book sequence Fireball (1981) and New Found Land (1983), wherein teenagers are able to visit parallel worlds where history took a different course. The first of these, set in a variation on Great Britain in which slavery is legal, is exceptionally good.