Why'd I have to get my big inspiration deep in a lake
in the Land of the Lizard People high in the Andes?
A dream-voyage round the world on the Black Current, only to wake up back in my animal village...
CAUTION: GORILLA MARRIAGE
Our Star Trek team explores alien ruins covered in cat scratches. Or are they writing? I uncover
Roman letters, Arabic numerals, I Ching trigrams, Chinese characters, Chumash pictographs.
Reading them turns us into cats! One cat lays eggs, but two more try to smash them...
CAUTION: CAT-EGG VANDALISM
On a volcano's rim, watching the lava fountains, I interview a huge blue alien bird who never planned to be a monk...
I face a barrage of deadly challenges out of every action film I've seen and every game I've ever played...
In a worldwide junkyard full of warring spooks, I finally meet the one whose message I need to hear...
MIKE'S DREAM: A volcano erupts. The lava pours into my hotel...
WAYAN'S DREAM: Our hill erupts in flame from a gas explosion...
I'm a hisa, a primitive alien who solves a high-tech crime for the humans. Then I hike home,
step by step, down a great shield volcano. Because shuttles leave your soul behind...
I contemplate Bilbo taunting Smaug, then Frodo, Sam and Gollum triggering Mt Doom to erupt,
but next I "remember" other fiery catastrophes and "realize" hobbits are always causing...
I'm fascinated by Io's feverish colors and tumultuous landscape, so I sculpted
a detailed portrait and came to some tentative conclusions about what we see...
CAUTION: AMATEUR SCIENCE, OH NO!
When the school district goes bankrupt, students flee creditors into a hell-cave.
But Joe Cool can skateboard even on lava in the Pit...
Jung's visions of dragons evolve from fiery destroyers
to thieves who can be forced to give up treasure
to peacful, luminous guardians of the sacred...
A vast sea-world with 7 times Earth's mass, whose isles are home to at least 19 intelligent species...
CAUTION: CUTE ALIENS, WEIRD SEX CUSTOMS, GODLESS EVOLUTION!
A volcano erupts in San Francisco! No human could survive the blast, but one researcher does--what IS he?
Mars as it will be 1000 years from now, terraformed. A guided tour with photos...
On our roadtrip, I notice strange crags north of our highway, and deduce they form a ring: a caldera like
Crater Lake. But my friends can't see the pattern, just the pieces! I wake. The mail comes. With postcards of...
CAUTION: ANNOYING TO E.S.P. SKEPTICS
I'm a shaggy primitive whose tribe's outgrown our caves. We migrate, and meet two new species of people...
God offers gifts to pilgrims, so my sister enters his door. Fierce light shoots out...
I rise out of my body, find I'm invulnerable, visit the moon, with its volcanic rocks, re-enter
my body, "wake" and write the dream--only to wake again and find all my notes gone!...
We're spirits over a volcanic fountain of energy. And some of us prepare to ride the current up to...
CAUTION: ASSUMES MYSTICAL LITERACY
I was on an island about to explode like Krakatoa. I warned the French colonial authorities "4,000
people will die if we don't get them out!" but no one listened. I woke. The paper came. "Mont
Pelée erupts, kills 40,000". I had missed a zero! But 40,000 turned out to be wrong too, implying...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
A dry little world with many small seas, Serrana has at least six intelligent species
and an anarchist culture. It's a tribute to Ursula Le Guin's anarchist utopia,
"The Dispossessed", and Kropotkin's theories of biological cooperation...
CAUTION: ANARCHIST POLITICS, ALIEN NUDITY
My childhood home explodes into a vast pyroclastic cloud that comes boiling toward me, miles away...
CAUTION: DOOM
Tour a rugged, scenic moon with air and water in deep canyons sheltering a dozen intelligent species
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, SCIENCE
I bike up a Hawaiian hill toward a lava fountain. A house catches fire, but it's blocks ahead.
I go a bit closer. Then a heat-shimmer shows deadly gas has crept ahead of the flames...
CAUTION: FATAL MISJUDGMENT
Tour Venus as it will be in 1000 years, after terraforming: paradise for dozens of intelligent species!
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
A TV documentary shows the history of war. Or does it? In what war did great clouds of flame
swallow sailing ships? Every scene they show is a natural disaster. Why are they lying?
I take a shortcut with the Warm Fuzzies, boating on lava through the earth's core,
and now when a volcano erupts, I know who it is that's quarreling beneath..