Reviews for Volcanoes and Earthquakes (Earth Science Library)

The average rating for Volcanoes and Earthquakes (Earth Science Library) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-15 00:00:00 Scott Daniels Contents: (1) The Indelible Kind (Vince Kroginold, son of the Cougar Canyon Group, whose immediate family is detached for research purposes). (2)J-Line to Nowhere (In which the city is compared to a coral reef: Everybody is impressed by the massive skeletons, but what about the tiny organic beings who created it?) (3) You Know What, Teacher? (Teachers become repositories of family secrets) (4) The Effectives (So IS prayer subject to analysis?) (5) Loo Ree (cf Wyndham's Chocky) (6) The Closest School (Vannie may not be old enough for school--after all, she's not yet 600) (7) Three-Cornered And Secure (Angels' work is never done. Who suspected that cloverleafs would be disruptive of space-time?) (8) The Taste of Aunt Sophronia (Sophronium can never be made good tasting. How could you know it was medicine, if it doesn't taste bad?) (9) The Believing Child (Dismey doesn't necessarily have greater powers than other children. It's just that it never occurs to her to doubt that she HAS such powers) (10) Through A Glass--Darkly (What if you could see into the past with your peripheral vision?) (11) As Simple as That (After all, who CARES what caused the holocaust? We live in the world we live in, moldy bread, roofless classrooms, and all) (12) Swept And Garnished (So which is worse: a multitude of phobias (with rituals to deal with them), or sheer meaninglessness?) (13) One of Them (But WHICH one? One of 'them' is a murderer, and one the victim. But which is the narrator? It may be a matter of life and death that she find out which she is. (14) Sharing Time (Not exactly the Midwich Cuckoos. The spheres that are sent for the human children break down their barriers to telepathy. The teachers have to ensure that the children can rebuild some of the barriers, so that the children can go on learning independently, even if they share the knowledge later) (15) Ad Astra (Ok, it would be a very useful thing to have people who breathe CO2 and exhale O2. But how to replicate the accident that created the first one?) (16) Incident After (Adaptation after a holocaust is not always in big things) (17) The Walls (Time travel is not always under the control of the traveler) (18) Crowning Glory (Fashion becomes the enemy of progress. If nobody grows their hair long, how can the aliens get the hair they need for technical purposes?) (19) Boona on Scancia (I'll buy flying dogs, though it's a bit of a stretch. But is it plausible that they could interbreed with Earth dogs?) (20) Love Every Third Stir: (Aunt Comfort is not a witch. Of COURSE she isn't. But her potions are remarkably efficacious, even so).

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-29 00:00:00 John Hornstein Not quite as good as the Anything Box, but many delightfully strange stories as teachers (mostly) try to cope with weirdness among their students, whether it's admitting an ET to class ("The Closest School,"), a not-so-imaginary playmate ("Loo Ree"), a girl getting a scary revenge on bullies ("The Believing Kind," which may be my favorite in this set) or coping with the aftermath of the apocalypse ("Three-Cornered and Secure."). There's some really good writing in here (the future slang and fashions in "Crowning Glory," for instance) and several funny ones. "You Know What Teacher?" is, unusually, a straight mystery story. Curiously most of the stories seem to have been published for the first time in this volume (only about half have a "first published in" credit). Did she write a bunch of extra stories so the collection would be big enough, or what? In any case, well worth reading.