However, the British Prime Minister quickly steps down and Cabinet Member Raymond Welling takes his place, with one of his first moves being to orchestrate a plan to bomb all of the major UK cities in order to limit the amount of strain put on the nation’s swiftly depleting food supplies. The British government insists that it has everything under control. The virus continues to spread west, mutating as it goes, until the fifth strain of the virus hits the UK.Ī counter-virus is quickly established, in a vain hope of killing off the Chung-Li virus. Massive famine resulting from the complete destruction of the Far East’s rice fields has left an estimated 200 million Chinese citizens either dead or dying. The novel was renamed ‘No Blade Of Grass’ for the US publication.Ī highly contagious rice virus dubbed ‘The Chung-Li Virus’ has brought China to its knees. The book was also a runner-up for the International Fantasy Award in 1957. The novel has since become a Penguin Modern Classic, receiving worldwide success and being dubbed a masterpiece in post-apocalyptic fiction. ‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in.First published back in 1956, British author John Christopher’s (the pseudonym adopted by Christopher Samuel Youd) third published novel ‘The Death Of Grass’ was the first of a number of tales written by the author that delved into a post-apocalyptic premise. The Mars aspect, he felt, was irrelevant. 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. 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.’

The Death of Grass by John Christopher