I would recommend this book to tweens and younger teens looking for a quick read that is realistically dark and frightening. Everything–the plague, the decay, Neil’s emotional state, the will to survive–is described with fascinating realism throughout the book, making it a compelling and quick read. As the plague becomes a major element in the story, the book becomes morbidly fascinating as Christopher describes, in crushing detail, the end of the world as we know it. The orphaning of Neil, before the plague, is brutally sad. Neil deals with the everyday needs of survival as well as the loneliness of being alone in the world as he presses on, searching for other survivors.Įven before the plague sweeps through the plot, this is a bleak novel. Neil, who survives the plague, is left in an empty, silent world. As he adjusts to his new life with his grandparents, a terrible plague sweeps the world, killing off just about the entire population. Neil Miller is left orphaned as the lone survivor in a car accident that kills his entire family.
‘What happens between the people,’ he said, ‘that’s the thing I’m interested in.’Įmpty World is another post-apocalyptic children’s novel by John Christopher. 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.’
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