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Clara Mackintosh is the younger sister of title character Johnny Mackintosh in the series of books by English novelist Keith Mansfield, published by Quercus Books.
Johnny Mackintosh is the fictional hero of a series of books by English novelist Keith Mansfield, published by Quercus Books.
Keith Mansfield, born in Scunthorpe, England in 1965, is an English writer and publisher. He is the author of the Johnny Mackintosh series of novels, has scripted and advised on several television programmes, including It's Not Rocket Science for the UK network ITV. and he was also a publisher for science books at Oxford University Press.
Quercus was an independent publishing house based in London. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Smith and Wayne Davies. It was acquired by Hodder & Stoughton in 2014.
Clara appears early in Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London , the first book of the series, as a pupil at the Proteus Institute for the Gifted (located near the fictional town of Yarnton Hill in southwest England). Johnny finds her and together they leave Earth in a space elevator and their adventures begin. [1]
Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London is the first novel in a series of young adult books written by Keith Mansfield and published by Quercus. The book opens on the thirteenth birthday of the title character and is written entirely from Johnny Mackintosh’s point of view.
A space elevator is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system. The main component would be a cable anchored to the surface and extending into space. The design would permit vehicles to travel along the cable from a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, directly into space or orbit, without the use of large rockets. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end in space beyond geostationary orbit. The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the outward/upward centrifugal force, which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth. With the tether deployed, climbers could repeatedly climb the tether to space by mechanical means, releasing their cargo to orbit. Climbers could also descend the tether to return cargo to the surface from orbit.
Clara is portrayed as having blonde hair, blue eyes (inlaid with silver flecks) and pale skin, unblemished apart from a pattern of seven freckles on the inside of her left shin in the shape of the constellation the Plough (her 'Starmark'). In the books she is described as ‘Owlein’, meaning she has the extremely rare ability to ‘fold’ space. She lives aboard the spaceship the Spirit of London, from the outside a carbon copy of the skyscraper known as the London Gherkin.
30 St Mary Axe, informally known as The Gherkin, is a commercial skyscraper in London's primary financial district, the City of London. It was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004. With 41 floors, it is 180 metres (591 ft) tall and stands on the former sites of the Baltic Exchange and Chamber of Shipping, which were extensively damaged in 1992 by a bomb placed by the Provisional IRA in St Mary Axe, a narrow street leading north from Leadenhall Street.
