The Death Of Grass

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The Death Of Grass (UK title; the US title is No Blade Of Grass) is a 1956 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel written by the British author John Christopher. It deals with the concept of a virus that kills off all forms of grass.

As the story opens, the initial viral strain has already attacked rice crops in East Asia causing massive famine and a mutation has appeared which infects the staple crops of West Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley, threatening a famine engulfing the whole of the Old World, while Australasia and the Americas attempt to impose rigorous quarantine to exclude the virus.

The novel follows the trials and struggles of the narrator's family as they attempt to make their way across the United Kingdom, which is already descending into anarchy, to the safety of his brother's potato farm.

The book is unusually harsh in post-apocalyptic science fiction, with the main characters sacrificing many of their morals in order to stay alive. At one point, when their food supply runs out, they kill an innocent family - simply to take their bread. The narrator justifies this with the belief that "it was them or us." Some critics have viewed this as an attempt by the author to distance the work from the cosy catastrophe pattern in a way parallelling the relationship of William Golding's Lord of the Flies to its model Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne.