John Christopher books

Anthologies

Collections

Standalone Novels

The Fireball Trilogy Reading Order

The Sword of the Spirits Reading Order

The Tripods Reading Order

John Christopher was the primary pen name of Samuel Youd, a British writer born in 1922 in Knowsley, Lancashire. After serving in the Royal Signals during World War II, he began publishing science fiction in the early 1950s. His first major success came with The Death of Grass (1956), published in the US as No Blade of Grass, which imagined the collapse of civilization after a virus destroys all grass crops worldwide. The book was adapted into a film in 1970. He continued writing disaster novels for adult readers throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, including The World in Winter, A Wrinkle in the Skin, and The Possessors.

In 1967, Christopher turned to young adult fiction with The White Mountains, the first book in The Tripods trilogy. The series, set in a future where alien machines have conquered humanity, became one of the most widely read YA science fiction works of the 20th century and was adapted into a BBC television series in the 1980s. He wrote two more young adult trilogies: The Sword of the Spirits (1970-1972), set in a post-apocalyptic medieval England, and The Fireball Trilogy (1981-1986), about two boys transported to an alternate world. His standalone YA novels include The Lotus Caves, The Guardians (winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 1970), and Empty World. He published 38 books over a career spanning nearly sixty years and died in 2012 at the age of 89.