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A gripping young adult novel about a future England which has devolved into a sort of city-country apartheid dictatorship. The class system and the monarchy in present-day little Britain make the suspension of disbelief all too easy. A rebellion against this oppressive system is inevitable for a decent character, and becoming that person is a big part of the journey for the protagonist in this excellent little book.

The first section of the book, which describes the bleak urban drudgery of the city's workers, reminded me of the dismal London of the 1970s, which spawned the punk rock movement. I wouldn't claim that "The Guardians" is in the same class as "The Handmaid's Tale" (especially because John Christopher has a poor record of female representation in my reading so far) , but I was also reminded of Margaret Attwood's classic as I was reading "The Guardians".

If you are the type of reader who enjoys books written for old and young people, you win. In fact books for young readers like "The Guardians" are better thought of as books for everyone in my opinion.

John Christopher (the best-known pseudonym of Sam Youd) made some great achievements in the so-called young adult category. Here he plants his flag in the adult section of the library.

"A Wrinkle in the Skin" follows the format of the post-apocalypse sub-genre, but it goes deeper than most. The title alludes to the small changes on the surface, but the black heart of humanity is the real subject here.

The disaster which wipes out most of the population is an unexpected, planet-wide earthquake. Its cause is unknown, its effects so devastating that every building on earth is destroyed, whole landscapes transformed, oceans drained. The protagonist, Matthew Cotter, sets out from the Island of Guernsey, clawing his way through the devastation, to find his daughter. On the way he discovers that, far from coming together to keep the spark of humanity alive, the traumatised survivors have turned to barbarism, rape and murder.

Unlike the empty cities and plentiful bounty of other fictional apocalypses, this one leaves a harsh and hostile land, where crops and animals have been churned into mud by the cataclysm. Even the tinned food has been buried, forcing the survivors to dig with their bare hands in the hope of finding a meal of baked beans and condensed milk.

Matthew encounters more than one shattered survivor who has succumbed to religious fervour, believing the geological reality of "the Bust" to be a divine punishment, the arrival of the end times. He is much better at diagnosing their madness than he is at recognising his own delusions.

After a few dozen pages of the relentless descriptions of the horror visited on the earth, I felt like I too was transported into a sort of revelation, a journey into the heart of darkness, perhaps. There are also strong echoes of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", which post-dates "A Wrinkle in the Skin" by three decades. The biblical allusions are perhaps less elegant than those in "Earth Abides" by George Stewart, but overall I feel like John Christopher has made it into the upper echelons with this book.

Inevitably I must also compare "A Wrinkle in the Skin" to John Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids". That more famous work always invites the reader to cheer on the survivors who choose altruism, who trust in the best of humanity, and vanquish the tyrants and looters. You always feel you are along for the ride, that if it came to the crunch, you'd be one of the good guys, siding with Mason and Coker against the killer walking plants and the clueless humans who are doomed to become their fertiliser.

By contrast, John Christopher isn't saying the psychopaths will inherit the earth, but a hopeful future isn't guaranteed. You have to fight for it, and at every stage there's a real chance the dark side will overwhelm you.

Re-reading these books after about 20 years, the thing I like most about them is still the concept of the caps. In the future earth under alien occupation, at the age of 14 all humans have one of these metal mind-control devices fitted to their heads, making them unquestioning, devoted slaves of their alien overlords. The trilogy was written in 1967 and '68, a time when young people were breaking free of the stifling expectations of conformity laid down by their parents' generation, and I've always associated "The Tripods" with the cultural explosion in the decade of my birth.

The story follows a group of boys who question the tradition of capping, and run away to escape the terrifying coming-of-age ritual . Over the course of three books, they join a resistance movement and eventually triumph over the Tripods. Some might find the 'Boys Own Adventure' style of the plot to be rather old-fashioned and obvious, but I greatly enjoyed its pulpy simplicity. The set-up is acknowledged to be a remix of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, so it fits.

On this re-reading I was also struck by the clear influence on the Second World War on the story. The main characters of the book are English, French and German. The domination of the Tripods and their plan for the extinction of humanity is an echo of the Holocaust. In the preface to the 35th anniversary edition, the author says he wanted to create a scenario where yielding to tyranny and slipping into mindless oblivion was the easy option, while those who chose freedom and the righteous fight against tyranny faced hardship and danger.

The warlike nature of humanity is another theme. Once the alien enemies are defeated, the triumphant men (for they are all men) resume the rivalries which preceded the occupation. The boys (ALL boys) who defeated tyranny take on a new cause of peace. They've also developed an appreciation for low-tech pursuits like farming and sailing. In the age of surveillance capitalism, the controlling addiction of apps and manipulative social media is a modern parallel to the caps which John Christopher probably never imagined in 1967.

For the second time in a review of John Christopher's work, I have to highlight the dismal representation of gender roles in these books. Girls and women are barely even present in the events portrayed. I took a star off for this reason. It's a terrible shame when the other themes in the book are so strong. The author refers in his preface to the "girls and boys" who read his books, but I can understand why he would fail to capture the imagination of many female readers. If any boys read these books today, I think they would benefit from some guidance to draw their attention to this deficiency.

The dawning awareness of your own mortality is a common theme in young adult fiction, often paired with a sexual awakening. You get both here, but mostly, it's the death.

There's been a plague of books and shows about plagues lately. This one from 1977 distinguishes itself by depicting a plague of premature ageing. Suddenly the inevitable end comes hurtling towards the whole human race at super speed, and even toddlers suddenly become gnarled, wrinkled and senile, then die quietly in their sleep.

YA fiction became bolder and more explicit about sex and death around the time this book was written, and there's plenty of shocking confrontation here to have it banned by squeamish or rabidly zealous US school boards. The very bits they would no doubt object to are the best parts of this book.

John Christopher was a friend of John Wyndham. The work of the triffids creator was famously (and unfairly in my opinion) smeared as "cosy catastrophes" by Brian Aldiss. 'Empty World', might qualify for Aldiss' epithet, if it weren't for the corpse-laden first half of this little novel. The second half changes gears and becomes a sort of bisexual love triangle and morality play. The ending is satisfying, but the first half of the book is the best. The grieving protagonist is numbed by his tragedy, giving the author an opportunity to serve us up some meaty existential detachment and alienation.

After a day's reflection I have removed a star because of dated sex and gender portrayals. Mainly, it is unacceptable for a male character to forcibly kiss a girl to resolve an argument, it is sexual assault. In the story it turns out it was what she wanted but didn't express it. Also the male character didn't know this, he just kissed her without consent. Female readers will recognise this garbage. In real life, a boy having an argument with a girl does not mean he should kiss her without her agreement, this only happens in the warped imagination of boys trained to believe these rapey fictions.

I've read a few of John Christopher's books and he is not too good with inclusiveness. I'll go easy on him here because he has at least included two interesting female characters, and it is an isolated incident. The author should have paid closer attention to his buddy John Wyndham, who created powerful female characters, inspired by his real-life partner.

In my recent re-reading of "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier, I found the story completely ruined by the ridiculous objectification of the female characters who are remote or peripheral. It's a shame because it was a groundbreaking book in so many other ways. Now I can't recommend it to young readers. I wouldn't go so far with John Christopher's books, but I think any boys reading them would benefit from some guidance about the dated attitudes presented in books like this.

This book does a superb job at corralling the unruly herd of musical creators who stampeded through the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was MY time. I was 16 in 1979, excited by punk, enamoured with the new music which was emerging.

Each individual artist from this time is unique, they include Public Image Ltd on one end of the scale, and the Thompson Twins at the other. The artists could be abrasive and uncompromising, or commercial and artistically slight, but Reynolds deftly identifies a common thread that links them all. What is that thread? It's hard to pin down, but I think the title gives the best indication. In 1976 the original punks smashed down the walls that commercialised popular culture had built up over the preceding two decades. Postpunk was about the possibilities created once we could venture forth beyond those walls.

Towards the end of the book Reynolds makes some comparisons with the preceding cultural breakout of the 1960s. There's a sense that the first version was messed up, and the punks were trying to get it right this time. I'm reminded of the key line in a 60s touchstone, the film 'Easy Rider': "we blew it".

Perhaps the ambitions of the punks and those who followed were not as lofty as their older brothers and sisters. Perhaps Peter Fonda's chopper-riding character was being a bit harsh on his 60s travellers. But after reading this great book, I think we can feel pretty good about our second attempt. We didn't blow it, whatever "it" was.

Philosophy is bunk. I've gleaned that philosophers in the course of history have felt the need to concoct a cosmology. Over the centuries the great discoveries of science have rendered those earlier confections meaningless, yet they linger. If all the great thinkers of classical antiquity had access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and EInstein, they would have saved a lot of time and not bothered with their speculations about the will of the gods in creating life and matter and all the rest.

Here we have Olaf Stapledon who does indeed have access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, come up with a load of tedious waffle trying to describe god. Stapledon thinly disguises his theological nonsense as a journey through space and time. It gets worse and worse as the book goes on as he loses interest in the disguise . Stapledon shouldn't have bothered to write it, and I don't think you should bother to read it.

For me, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, continuing to push the themes of race, gender, nuclear armageddon, sex and biology. The alien-human hybrid Jodahs is the narrator. It - for that is its pronoun - is another Christ figure, like Akin in the previous novel. But this time the name suggests Judas, and there is frequently a suggestion that a putative mediator could turn out to be a betrayer.

One thing I like about Butler is how she goes to extremes. In this case the most sexually desirable creatures left on planet earth are a community of nuclear mutants afflicted with debilitating degenerative conditions and horrible skin diseases. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

In her other novels (e.g. the Patternist series) she portrays the worst traits of human debauchery and murder, just to make it hard to pick a side - hegemonising aliens or violent human psycho-killers. Here I found I had sympathy for her protagonist Jodahs, but at the same time the ooloi are an alien species with a special gland that excretes the ultimate date-rape drug. One whiff and you can't help falling in love with that tentacled freak from space. Consent and free will, it seems, are more complicated in the post-nuclear alien contact phase of humanity.

But then, Jodahs doesn't have any choice in the matter either, it has to find human mates or descend into a suicidal metamorphosis where it devolves into a mindless slug and finally dissolves itself in the post-nuclear swamp.

Much as this is a compelling story with some appealing concepts, Butler's futures are not aspirational.

In typical Butler style, the second book in this series moves on to the next generation. Lilith, the human collaborator with the alien saviour-colonisers, fades into the background, making way for her half alien son Akin. He's not portrayed as a mythical Christ-figure, his motivations are too deeply biological and personal for that. But he is a potential saviour for the human holdouts who would rather die out than interbreed with the hegemonising Oankali.

There's a perfect balance here. The Oankali have rescued the tiny remnant of humanity which survived the nuclear holocaust, and they treat their new friends with love that goes all the way into the sexual realm and way beyond what we thought was possible with our limited capacity for fleshy pleasures. On the other hand they dictate that humanity can only survive as an interbred hybrid with themselves. Fuck with us and have half-alien babies, or remain sterile and go extinct. Benevolence and dictatorship never co-existed with such intensity.

The rebellious humans would appear to be completely within their rights to resist, but the Oankali have determined with absolute certainty that they will only end up destroying themselves all over again, so there's no future for them. The humans are already murderous arseholes, kind of proving the point.

Akin knows that too, but he can't help himself. He wants to save humanity even if it's doomed to failure.

As usual with Butler, the moral and social dilemmas of her fiction are laced with passion and horror, and the result is a super intense portrayal of love, life, sex and death. There are no easy answers, no happy-ever-after, but the messy, ambiguous reality gives very satisfying HARD answers, and little bits of happiness along the way.

Another essential novel from a master of the genre.