john christopher

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To accompany my interview with Sam Youd, this is an article I wrote in 1999 for Circus 8 on Sam’s best known pen-name, John Christopher, under which he wrote such enduring classics as the Tripods and Sword of the Spirits trilogies and The Death of Grass.
 

In a review in the Independent newspaper of Brian Aldiss’ autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, John Christopher was said to be one of the five ‘most important British science-fiction writers’. Aldiss himself has often spoken of his admiration for John Christopher, describing him in Billion Year Spree as ‘an intelligent and witty man, marvellously equipped as a writer’. One rarely comes across this kind of recognition, which is a great shame as John Christopher, real name Sam Youd, fully deserves it for his important contribution to British science fiction over the last fifty years.

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Christopher Samuel YoudWith the release of the BBC Tripods series on DVD and the promise of an Alex Proyas film adaptation, I thought this interview with the trilogy’s prolific author, conducted in 1999, might be of interest. I’d never interviewed anyone before, and found Sam incredibly generous and a true gent.
 

Were you a fan of science fiction from an early age?

I started to find SF fascinating in the occasional story in more general boys’ magazines, then discovered the (I think) September ‘32 issue of Astounding and was totally hooked. Before that though I had been very fond of Coral Island and Swiss Family Robinson, both of which have characters with whom a boy can identify in - this is the important bit - exotic but at the same time possible settings. As I’ve often said, 30s SF offered extrapolation from current scientific thinking - not entirely and certainly not reliably, but one could fool oneself one might eventually find life on the planets in the way the Swiss Robinsons found that amazing (and quite impossible) variety of plants and wild life on that tiny Pacific island. I tell myself I turned away from SF when later scientific knowledge showed the solar system to be a barren emptiness and extra-planetary travel just wasn’t feasible. But I feel it was also like being through an intense love affair: the passion can’t be resurrected.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

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