Claire Palmer

Stardust: Tales from the Edge of Time Claire Palmer

It's midsummer, 2020, in a nightmarish, Orwellian world, where nuclear war has reduced the world to enclaves of people living in enclosed tower blocks in a rigid police state. Life is bearable and relatively comfortable at the top of the tower blocks, but a living hell at the bottom, which can be easily reached if you flout the rules. Everything outside is a wasteland. A studious young girl is doing her homework on this dark stormy night, half-way up one of the tower blocks, when some random calculations she enters into her computer conjure up a strange, sizzling electronic green circle in the room. The surveillance cameras in her apartment trigger an immediate police response, and just as they're breaking the door down to arrest her, she jumps headlong into the circle, which transports her through time...back to 1979, where she lands with a crash in a tree in the grounds of Oakwyk Hall, a gothic mansion set in the depths of the English countryside. Unaccustomed to the wonders of the natural world, she is astonished at the beautiful, scented, starlit world around her...and can hear the happy sounds of a wedding party in the nearby house. She climbs down from the tree, and it is here that the battle to save humanity and planet earth itself from the horrific future she has experienced, begins...