Alien Volcanoes – Rosaly M. C. Lopes & Michael W. Carroll ***

I really don’t know what to make of this mid-sized coffee table book. (In practice, that ‘coffee table’ label is a bit unfair – the book is that size and has glossy pages with plenty of colour illustrations, but on most pages there is more text than there are photos.)

The first chapter is on Earth’s prehistoric volcanoes, then a chapter on the different types of volcanoes before launching into the meat of the book – volcanoes on both Earth-like and gaseous worlds in the solar system, ending with a short and not particularly informative chapter on volcanoes in culture. The illustrations range from very clear photographs to good (sometimes indistinguishable) artists’ impressions, though some of the pictures – most of the ones of Iceland and a painting of Pompei, for instance – are strangely murky, more photo album snaps than glossy picture book illustrations.

Overall it just didn’t work for me. It doesn’t give the in-depth exploration of volcanoes that I think could be made fascinating, but instead spends too much effort on the alien volcanoes of the title, which inevitably are more removed from our experience, giving less emotional linkage. The illustrations aren’t good enough to make this an excellent picture book in its own right, but the way it’s written doesn’t captivate either.

Don’t be put off too much by this review – volcano fans will find a lot to interest them, but for me, it just lacked that spark of excitement.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Jo Reed

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog