Thanks for mentioning this, great. Wow, young Fry. And the faces Laurie makes.

Basics Photography 01: Composition by David Präkel

Aimed at beginners (me, really), this book provides a very basic overview of how to approach composition in photography. Chapters include formal elements, space, time etc. and present info in a bite-size format, two pages each for topics such as perspective, scale, form, structure, patterns, color, and motifs. Most of the treatment of these subjects could undoubtedly go a lot deeper (some felt quite banal), but I did learn a few things and will hang on to this book for future reference. Glossy pages throughout with many inspiring images by renowned artists illustrating the concepts at hand well.

Even for people starting out with photography who want to look into the rules and science that make the craft tick, I would say search for something more substantial.

Ready Player Two

by Ernest Cline

I'd recommend reading this book.

Planetary Adventures. Another pulp anthology from DMR Books. Five stories that came out between 1937 and 1953.

First up is Temple of Earth by Poul Anderson. This is arguably the best story in the book. This could almost be a Conan story. A barbarian raider is captured and offered by a corrupt nobleman the deal of continuing to live if he assassinates the troublesome head of a rival priesthood. The important detail is that the story takes place on the Moon. The gist is that Earth people established self-sufficient lunar colonies, mostly for mining purposes, but then a nuclear war broke out and the colonies were cut off from the mother world. A thousand years later, the colonies have devolved into rival city-states, maintaining enough technical knowledge to keep their atmospheres going, but otherwise knowledge of where they came from has mutated into religion, with Earth becoming their idea of heaven (Mars has become hell). Anderson is one of my favorite writers because of stuff like this. He has a wise observance of history and human nature.

Next is World of the Dark Dwellers by Edmond Hamilton, another favorite of mine. This is the one story in the book that goes beyond the pulp-era standard of keeping space opera contained to our solar system. It figures that Hamilton, one of the great fathers of really big sci-fi, would be the one to do it. The hero here is a guy who learns that his family is descended from men that lived in a far away galaxy. They were kings who escaped their world after a villain made a pact with some Lovecraftian (or Howardian) worm creatures that lived beneath the surface and conquered the planet. Our hero decides he's going home to kick their asses! It's maybe a bit pat and, being a short story, it's more inclined to rush forward than calmly reason things out, but it's quite entertaining and the titular dwellers are memorably disgusting.

Third is The Eyes of Thar by Henry Kuttner, yet another favorite of mine. This one is set on Mars. The protagonist is on the run from authorities because after his wife was killed, he swore vengeance on pretty much everyone. Chased in the desert, he stumbles into an ancient, buried laboratory and makes contact with a woman in another dimension who's also assailed by an enemy and who bears a remarkable resemblance to his wife. There are relatively rational explanations for everything. You may have even predicted the explanation already. The story has a yearning, bittersweet quality.

Empress of Mars by Rocklynne is up next. Rocklynne is not one of my favorites and this story is probably the worst in the book. The hero is on a mission to rescue his princess, who's been abducted by the evil empress of Mars. My experience with Rocklynne's work is that he tends to top out somewhere in the "eh, it's alright" range and that's where this lands. As a sword-and-planet story, it feels more like Otis Adelbert Kline's work than Edgar Rice Burroughs in that it doesn't show a great deal of imagination. Aside from certain details like a bit with flying machines and a ray-gun, this story could almost just be set on Earth, maybe somewhere like Asia Minor or the Mediterranean. The Empress could be Cleopatra or someone like that.

Man of Two Worlds by Bryce Walton is last. My one experience with Walton is from DMR's Renegade Swords and I remember his story being entertaining, sort of a hidden gem. Not necessarily amazing in its general outline, but fun and imaginative, willing to do a bit extra compared to most writers. This story is similar, which makes me wonder if Walton demands a bit more attention and deserves a proper collection of his own. This one is also on Mars. The hero and heroine are rebels pursued by representatives of a tyrannical colonial authority. The woman has some kind of psychic vision/racial memory of an alien pyramid they can use to escape, so they do and they end up in the ancient past. Then it turns out the people in this ancient Mars were human and had a culture similar to ancient Greece/Estruscan and Earth civilization is somehow derived from them. The hero's mind occupies the body of Theseus, who was just defeated by the Minotaur in the labyrinth. The woman becomes Ariadne. The minotaur isn't a bull-man but a Lovecraftian entity that sucks the minds out of people, which is how the hero became Theseus - he just leaped into his now mindless shell. They basically recreate the myth but on Mars and there's aliens instead of mythological figures and CONAN THE CIMMERIAN appears out of nowhere because the author was a Weird Tales fan. The story isn't necessarily some kind of masterpiece, but there's a MORE IS MORE DAMMIT~! sensibility to it that I find very appealing. If nothing else, it's very interesting and shows Walton to have been a rather imaginative guy who wasn't afraid to just shotgun ideas into stories that more polite writers would have refrained from doing.

Sounds a lot of fun to me, so much so that I only skimmed your summaries as not to spoil myself something. I can see picking that up in the future. Had a look at their website, cool catalog — a lot of hilarious campy titles and wild covers.