Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Samuel Youd – aka John Christopher – dies aged 89


Brian Aldiss leads tributes to a prolific author – of The Tripods and more than 50 other novels – who 'beat description'

John Christopher
John Christopher, the pen name of Samuel Youd (R) with the cover for the Penguin Classics reissue of The Death of Grass

British science fiction author Samuel Youd, who wrote the prescient story of environmental disaster The Death of Grass under one of his pseudonyms, John Christopher, has died.

Youd passed away on 3 February, his agent said on Monday. The author, best known for his young adult trilogy The Tripods and for The Death of Grass, which tells of a family fleeing London after a virus destroys the world's food supplies – "for years now we've treated the land like a piggy bank, to be raided" – was 89.

"He was a terrific guy. So bright, so intelligent, such a nice man – I have the fondest and most respectful memories of Sam Youd," said the acclaimed science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. "He used to work in the diamond trade in Hatton Garden, and would come down by train, travelling first class. He'd have a portable typewriter with him, and on that typewriter he would write novels, for I believe four different publishers, writing a different sort of novel under a different pseudonym for each. It beats description."

Under names including Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols and Anthony Rye, Youd wrote "science fiction, family histories, detective mysteries – he was amazingly prolific," said Aldiss, with more than 50 titles to his name. His prose was "very polished", added the author, comparing The Death of Grass favourably to John Wyndham's science fiction classic The Day of the Triffids. "He would always submit the first draft and would never revise it – he was so clear-minded that he would get it right the first time".

Born in Knowsley, near Liverpool, in 1922, Youd began writing seriously when he left the army in 1946. The Death of Grass was published in 1956, allowing him to give up his day job at the Industrial Diamond Information Bureau, while The White Mountains, the first book in the Tripods trilogy in which humanity is enslaved by alien machines, was published in 1967. The popular children's series was later adapted for television in the 1980s, and his young adult novel The Guardians, about a dystopian future, won him the Guardian prize for children's fiction.

Penguin Classics publisher Adam Freudenheim, who reissued The Death of Grass in 2009, called it a "seminal piece of science fiction". "It was ahead of its time, in terms of concerns about the environment, particularly, which makes it seem prescient and very relevant," said Freudenheim. "It speaks to our time."

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