CAN you imagine what your daily life would be like without all the electronic gadgets households and businesses depend on?

You would be late getting up because your alarm clock failed to go off and the kettle and microwave are on the blink.

The central heating has gone off and for some reason the radio and TV appear to be dead.

Staff cannot get into banks or offices with electronic locks.

In the supermarkets all the fridges have broken down and the tills do not work. Computers are rendered useless.

That's the chilling scenario in a gripping novel written by former Wiltshire public relations man Charles Dodd, which opens with an electronic wipe-out in Marlborough.

He claims to be the first writer to lift the lid on electromagnetic weaponry that, he said, is not sci-fi but is science fact.

The technology exists, he says, to send out invisible beams that will fry all electronic circuitry within range.

The book opens with a quotation from the New Scientist in July 2000: "The perfect weapon is the electromagnetic bomb, or e-bomb. Produce a high-power flash of radio waves or microwaves and it will fry any circuitry it hits."

It was this scientific report that gave Mr Dodd the inspiration for his first novel, Code 18 (Perfidia Press, £13.99)

In the book these weapons fall into the hands of international cyber terrorists who plan to use them to blackmail City banks and financial institutions into paying millions of pounds into offshore accounts.

But first, to make sure their weapons work, they give Marlborough a quick blast. Mr Dodd chose Marlborough as his setting because he liked to visit the town when he lived in Calne, where he set up his own public relations consultancy, Access.

Six years ago he moved to Spain with his Danish wife Kirsten, a painter, where he wrote his novel.