In an interview towards the end of his life, conversation turned to a recent spate of novels set on Mars and a possible setting for a John Christopher story: strand a group of people in a remote Martian enclave and see what happens. ‘I read somewhere,’ Sam once said, ‘that I have been cited as the greatest serial killer in fictional history, having destroyed civilisation in so many different ways – through famine, freezing, earthquakes, feral youth combined with religious fanaticism, and progeria.’ He is perhaps best known as John Christopher, author of the seminal work of speculative fiction, The Death of Grass (today available as a Penguin Classic), and a stream of novels in the genre he pioneered, young adult dystopian fiction, beginning with The Tripods Trilogy.

Over the following decades, his imagination flowed from science-fiction into general novels, cricket novels, medical novels, gothic romances, detective thrillers, light comedies … In all he published fifty-six novels and a myriad of short stories, under his own name as well as eight different pen-names. Dune was the novel that initially inspired me, but what I ended up with is more along the lines of Fury Road.Įnd-of-the-world scenarios leave us wondering who or what we might become, and if our species might end up getting precisely what it deserves.įrom Capitalism to Underpopulation, here are the top 13 horrible apocalypses that make people question their faith in humankind.Samuel Youd was born in Huyton, Lancashire in April 1922, during an unseasonable snowstorm.Īs a 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.’ In my debut novel, Lotus Blue (Talos, 2017), I envisioned a future ruined through corporate greed, careless governance and unregulated technological experimentation, a logical extrapolation of climate change denialism coupled with military applications of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems. There’s no shortage of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature out there - over 3,000 novels deal with nuclear aftermath alone.

Is there any such thing as a pleasant apocalypse? Probably not, although the cozy catastrophes of post-World War II seem to suggest that a global cataclysm might do the world a favor by wiping clean the slate, enabling the “right sort” of people to reclaim it. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

The Pool of Fire by John Christopher