Cirrus@Austlit

'Six hundred years ago, a group of pilgrims made their way to Canterbury, and Geoffrey Chaucer created one of the great works of English literature. A hundred years from now, a nuclear-powered steam train is stopped by a massive storm on its journey to Canterbury, the new capital of an England struggling to rise from the ashes of the twenty-first century. As the waters rise with the storm’s fury, the weird and wonderful passengers tell the stories of a new age…

'18 original short stories interwoven with a narrative thread that twines together the pieces to depict a fictional future exploring the stories that the people of that future tell each other.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'From a searing caricature of John Howard's white picket fence to a Canterbury tale of 21st century Britain; from a parable of life in a city skyscraper to a futuristic Western set in an impossible desert; from the end of the Earth to and Earth surviving under alien rule; from an adult fairy tale of a plague ridden Europe to the future. The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy fifth annual volume represents the best of Australia's writers for the fantastic, at the peak of their form' (Amazon).