A incredibly and beautifully written accesible science book withgeologist and cosmologist Natalie Starkey who embarks on a journey through the Solar System's weirdest and biggest volcanoes. Because our planet Earth isn't the one with fire explosions and eruptions, other planets have this strange phenomena and in much different occurences. I have enjoyed a lot this book and I will acquire a phyiscal book copy for my collection.

As a child of the space age I’ve been captivated by the many beautiful images that various probes, orbiters and landers have captured of our solar system and beyond. Using our understanding of our own planet and the data these programmes have sent back reveals how truth can really be stranger than fiction.

This book shows us how similar and alien the planets and moons of our own solar system can be and how working out how things work on those bodies can help us to better understand our home world. I was fascinated to learn the importance of volcanism and plate tectonics to life and of the increasing number of worlds found to have sub-surface oceans which could harbour life.

The only minor niggles for me were that the photographs were at the end of the book and there seemed to be no links to them in the text and there were no diagrams to help readers to visualise the topics being discussed. This may be because I read an advance copy given to me by the author via netgalley only for the pleasure of reading and leaving an honest review should I choose to. This said I found the book full of fascinating information and well worth reading.

A book on volcanoes and space?! Yes please. I don’t think you could get more of an epic badass book than space volcanology and it made for such a fantastic book.

It had a wonderful writing style that was so easy to read. It flowed perfectly and really drew the reader in and kept you immersed. It was so in-depth and detailed and I really learnt a lot throughout reading this book.

It covered all sorts of topics, including volcanoes here in earth and why they may be so entwined with the emergence of life, from what makes them, the different kinds you can find and all of the above applied to a cosmic setting. Volcanoes and cryovolcanoes, supervolcanoes and tectonic plates were discussed too.

We hopped over to Io, Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Pluto, Triton, Mars, the moon and some of the planets that we call neighbours. It was so interesting reading about these planets as well as asteroids and the potential hopeful cosmic locations where life may be found.

This book is a fab read for all those interested in space science, geology, natural sciences, geography and the science curious. A great read!

Fire and Ice is a fascinating and beautifully written popular science book following geologist and cosmologist Natalie Starkey on a journey as she leads you on a tour of the Solar System's tallest, coldest, hottest, and weirdest volcanoes. Earth isn't the only planet to harbor volcanoes. In fact, the Milky Way is littered with them. Fire and Ice explores the Solar System's volcanoes and is an unusual look into how these cosmic features are made and whether they are the key to life on other planets. We tend to think of volcanoes as disgorging hot, molten lava and emitting huge, billowing clouds of incandescent ash. Some planets follow this pattern like Mars, which has the largest volcano in the Solar System and our own Moon which had volcanoes on its surface billions of years ago. But it isn't the same across the rest of the Solar System. Pluto, for example, erupts methane, ammonia, water, and carbon dioxide, substances that freeze to form mountain chains made of ice rather than rock. Fascinatingly, the volcanoes in the Milky Way can be some of the hottest and coldest places on its moons and planets.

Whether they are formed of fire or ice, volcanoes are of huge importance for scientists trying to picture the inner workings of a planet or moon. Volcanoes dredge up materials from the depths and deliver them to the surface. The way in which they erupt and the products they generate can help scientists ponder bigger questions of the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System. From the red-hot summits of Jupiter's moon Io, to the coldest, icy carapace of Pluto, Natalie Starkey leads us on an incredible expedition throughout the cosmos to explore volcanoes and what they might mean for the future of our universe. A fascinating, deeply immersive and vividly descriptive romp through a lesser-known part of our solar system, Fire & Ice looks at how scientists explore these exotic cosmic features and relate them to familiar volcanoes on Earth, discovering how these planetary bodies made their surfaces, and whether such active planetary systems might host life. It's is a richly informative, impeccably researched and eminently readable science title and one I highly recommended.

Volcanoes have fascinated me for a long time, but I must admit that I hadn't given much thought to volcanoes on other planets. When I read the blurb for "Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System" I realised that here was a whole new avenue to explore - and what an exploration it turned out to be. It's written in a very engaging way, talking us through gently without too much heavy science. I found this book really exciting, and I'll be keeping my ear to the ground for new discoveries in this area.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.