John Christopher 1922-2012

A bad start to my day this morning, as I read the news that John Christopher had died. Of course, at age 89 it’s hardly a surprise, but still. As Damien Walker explains, for my generation of readers he was oftenan important first introduction to science fiction:

Readers of my 30-something generation are most likely to remember John Christopher for his young adult novels The Tripods and its adaptation for the small screen in the 1980s. The Tripods describes a future Britain where humanity has been enslaved to a race of alien invaders who travel in giant, three-legged walking machines. Fragments of The Tripods are lodged very deeply in my imagination, in particular the horrifying sense of immense and all-powerful authorities looming over life, beyond our control and understanding.

The Tripods Trilogy were not quite the first science fiction books I read in English rather than Dutch (having discovered that the local library was much more lenient in lending out English rather than Dutch adult books), but they were close. Appropriately I discovered them in the high school’s tiny little lending library, where they were some of the few books that appealed to me when I discovered it in my first year there. Having part of the first year of students who’d gotten English in their last year at primary school, I could just about read them, though they were supposedly a few grades about my reading level. They were the perfect sort of book for young teenagers, fitting that classic template of the young boy on the verge of initiation into adulthood rebelling against the strictures of his people, who runs away from home and finds the secret truths of his world, then fights and wins to restore the true order of things, and Christopher told it brilliantly. I must’ve reread them half a dozen times or more.

There was also The Guardians, about a young boy in a future dystopian England growing up to discover the true nature of his country and setting out to right ancient wrongs, which I also read half a dozen times or so. He was a consumate storyteller and could get you so wrapped up in a book you’d barely notice the time, as Jo Walton also experienced:

It was his 1977 novel Empty World that caused me to realise that adolescents were the natural continuing readers of cosy catastrophes. In Empty World all the adults and little children die of flu and the world is left to a handful of teenagers — this is so viscerally adolescent wish fulfillment that reading it (at twenty-two) I failed to get off the train and was carried on to Liverpool.

What greater compliment can any writer wish for?