John Christopher, pseudonym of Christopher Samuel Youd Biography

British writer, born in Lancashire, who also published novels under his own name, and as Peter Graaf and Hilary Ford. As Christopher, he became familiar to a large readership as the successor to J. Wyndham in the field of science fiction, and in novels such as The Death of Grass (1956) and The World in Winter (1962) he streamlined the ‘cozy catastrophe’ tale created by his mentor. This form of disaster narrative depicts an England threatened by catastrophe, and a family escaping into the countryside in search of new rural roots. Subsequently, he specialized in science fiction for adolescents, notably the tales collected in The Tripods Trilogy (1980), The Sword of the Spirits Trilogy (1980), and A Dusk of Demons (1993).