Christopher Pike (author)
| Christopher Pike | |
|---|---|
| Born | Kevin Christopher McFadden November 12, 1955 New York, New York |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1985–present |
| Genre | Horror, thriller, science fiction, young adult |
Christopher Pike is the pseudonym of American author Kevin Christopher McFadden (born November 12, 1955). He is a bestselling author of young adult and children's fiction.
McFadden was born in New York City in 1955, but grew up in California. He attended college briefly before dropping out and working various jobs such as house painting and computer programming. He initially tried his hand at writing science fiction and adult mystery, but later began writing teen thrillers due to an editor's suggestion. His first attempt resulted in the 1985 novel Slumber Party, a book about a group of teenagers who run into bizarre and violent events during a ski weekend. The book was an immediate success and Pike's career as a Young Adult author took off. In addition to his Young Adult novels, he has written several Juvenile novels under the Spooksville series title, as well as several adult novels such as his 1990 hit book, Sati. Though their peak popularity reigned at the same time, Pike was commonly heralded as the author R.L. Stine's Goosebumps and Fear Street readers turned to for a more mature novel, sitting as the middle ground with Stephen King the level above Pike.
On November 25, 1996, his book Fall into Darkness was adapted into a television movie of the same name, produced by his company Christopher Pike Productions.
In the 1993 novel "The Eternal Enemy", Pike came up with a particularly convoluted version of the classic Grandfather paradox: a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past, with the commonly used name coming from the variant - used in various stories, books and films - whereby a person travels to the past and kills their own grandfather, preventing the existence of their father or mother and therefore their own existence..Pike's version begins deceptively with the protagonist Rela seeming an ordinary American teenager - who lives in Los Angeles, is good at her studies, works at a library to earn some dollars, likes "cheerios and boys" and is especially very fond of one specific boy, her classmate Chris. Having suffered amnesia, Rela is unaware that in fact she is a time-traveler from the future, that Chris is in fact her grandfather - and that she had come back in time with the specific intention of killing him. That is because Chris, in addition to becoming her grandfather, would become a brilliant scientist who would create a race of cyborgs and robots - and they would eventually supersede human beings and make humanity extinct. However, even when recovering her memory, Rela can't bring herself to go through with killing Chris - deeply loving him, and knowing the young Chris to be innocent of any wrongdoing which his future self would commit. Rather, it is Rela who gets killed by her grandfather, who in the far future became himself a ruthless, pitiless robot and came back in time to eliminate the threat posed by her. Still, Rela ultimately succeeds in her mission of changing the future and saving humanity - before dying, she manages to leave a secret message to Chris, revealing the truth. Reading it, Chris becomes determined never to create robots and cyborgs, or become one himself.
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