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Soviet publications are painfully solemn in most respects, but in science they go the limit in their search for sensationalism. They tell with wide-eyed enthusiasm of numerous sightings of abominable snowmen. They have seriously reported salamanders that came to life after being frozen solid for 5,000 years; a semiconductor device that gives out more energy than is fed into it; a monster that leaves tracks on the bottom of the ocean; a heavy mass of ice that fell from space and did not melt; a mysterious force pervading the universe that makes all revolving bodies, such as Earth, take on a heartlike shape.
Sooner or later, such reports always prove to be false, but the fictioneers go on. And rarely has their futuristic science reached so far into the past as the eruption of Krakatoa.