The hurrying years
Throughout the world there was change, violent and uncompromising. Wars, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions; and the relentless revolution of the seasons. But to see it, to catch the monster with claws outstretched, was hardly to...
Category: Sam Youd
New US edition: THE DEATH OF GRASS
Originally published in 1956 (in the USA as No Blade of Grass, under which title it was filmed by Cornel Wilde), The Death of Grass marks a watershed in the history of the twentieth-century post-apocalyptic...
A writer’s winter
29th September sees the UK publication in the Penguin Worlds classic science-fiction series of a new edition of John Christopher’s The World in Winter, in which the Thames freezes, the whole of Europe lies under...
Who was John Christopher?
Sam Youd was born in Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.
As a young 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.’
Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies …
John Christopher is coming!
As The Independent’s Invisible Ink article put it, was there ever an author with so many pseudonyms? With its third publication, The SYLE Press turns its attention from the Hilary Ford novels to those of...
Why I wrote THE LOTUS CAVES – Part 2
John Christopher (also the author of SARNIA and A BRIDE FOR BEDIVERE) resumes his account of the writing of THE LOTUS CAVES. First published in 1969, republished on November 4th this year by Simon &...