The Death of Grass by John Christopher6/27/2023 But the swiftness with which society reverts to savagery is remarkable, and the evocation of man's culpability for the disaster - "For years now we've treated the land like a piggy bank, to be raided" - could hardly be more prescient. The prospect of atomic bombs being dropped to reduce the population may also have seemed more imminent in 1956 than it does now. You could argue it is too convenient that the hero has a friend in the Ministry of the Environment with access to classified information, as well as a family farm to escape to in Cumbria. His novels were popular during the 1950s and 1960s, most notably The Death Of Grass (1956), The World in Winter (1962), and Wrinkle in the Skin (1965), all works depicting ordinary people struggling in the midst of apocalyptic catastrophes. John Custance and his family flee London, though the journey becomes increasingly treacherous due to the rapid breakdown of civil and moral law. What Christopher has gone for is an exploration of the dynamics of a group in which individual members try to retain the standards of a civilised society after. John Christopher (1922-2012) was the pen name of Samuel Youd, a prolific writer of science fiction. A virus that attacks all species of grass, including wheat and rice, has caused mass starvation in China and is heading this way. It has now been reissued as a modern classic, and it's hard to understand why it has been ignored for so long. J ohn Christopher's mid-1950s vision of worldwide eco-disaster was recently named among the top 10 out-of-print books in Britain. 'The Death of Grass' is John Christophers best known novel and probably the ultimate disaster story.
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