My son is learning about geology while reading LoTR. He wants to know if the fires of Mt Doom where the One Ring was forged were lava, magma, or something else. Are the fires described anywhere in the main books or any of the other books?

From the 1960s; a sci-fi novel where the Constitution outlawed leaders from advocating for war. A feature of this future society was that as a symbol of non-aggression, people would amputate first a leg and have it replaced with a powerful prosthetic limb, then the other leg, and so on. The log...

Once upon a time, probably back in the late 1990s or thereabouts, I walked into a room where someone else had been watching something on television. I somehow got the impression it was an old movie, rather than a television episode from some science-fiction-themed show, but I now realize I canno...

I read part of this British YA novel in the '70s or the '80s. I am almost positive it was called 'A Drop of Fresh Water' or 'A Drop of Pure Water', although I have searched the internet for both titles and come up with nothing. The story: Society has broken down and the people of Britain are livi...

I think he had healing powers and kills a mimic in the dungeon that gives him the ability to reverse his magic to death magic.

Read this story in an anthology of not strictly science fiction many years ago. A man unhappy with his life is offered the opportunity after an interview to escape this world and live in basically a paradise. The person/alien who is interviewing him lets him know several famous individuals from t...

This recent story-ID question is a duplicate of this old question with the same answer accepted in a comment by the OP. Unfortunately, that old question was closed by the site police for allegedly needing "more focus". Can I close the new question as a duplicate of a closed question? Or do we jus...

During the Royal Award Ceremony in the final scene of the film Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977), some fleet troopers can be seen wearing a beige baseball cap. A behind-the-scenes photo allows us to see them more clearly. As we all know, the fleet troopers' uniforms consisted of pale blue...

I watched a movie on tv between a month or two ago. It's a modern action movie /thriller, made after 2010. The annoying part is that I started watching ten or so minutes after the start, I can't remember the main actors and the movie has in my opinion a generic name, like "Security protocol" or s...

At the end of the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Nebula exchanges gifts. Her gift for Rocket is Bucky Barnes’ vibranium arm. While Nebula didn't make her first on-screen appearance on Earth until Avengers: Endgame, there is a five-year gap during The Blip to consider. Bucky was taken aw...

The question has most of the elements that I remember, but not the author or title of the short story, which I’ve forgotten. The barker is setting up the exhibit and invites a child to critique it. As each audacious statement is made by the barker, the child shouts “lie!” to the false statements....

A post-apocalyptic novel set after a serious meltdown at Three Mile Island. One of the characters has a mutation that prevents her from getting nutrition except from blood. I think that one passage sees her drink blood from livestock. It had a title like ‘Into the drift’. I read it in the 90s. Pa...

I'm looking for a short story featuring a bumbling human private investigator and his hyper-competent space-alien sidekick. In the story, it's noted that where most intelligent species have evolved from predators, the sidekick's species evolved from scavengers. This comes up when the sidekick r...