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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9545678" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Do yourself a favor and read Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad. As with her translation of the Odyssey, it comes with a great introduction that covers a lot of language details we monolingual sorts won’t have known, and some of the history of prior translations and how she made her choices, and like that. And the. There’s the work itself, which is graceful and engaging. You will likely end up quoting from it. It’s a delight. (Even more so with the audio version, which she reads herself.)As for me, first book finished in 2025 was Beyond Apollo, as a memorial for the just recently passed Barry Malzberg. This was a challenging, confrontational story when it came out in 1972, and still is. It’s the story of a failed expedition to Venus, narrated in fragmentary short chapters by it’s only survivor. He’s not in good shape, and he’s lying to his debriefers about what happened and how the other astronaut died, partly to avoid reexamining the crucial points himself. I loved it, even with a nearly J.G. Ballard level of detachment when it comes to sex - at least it very well serves the overall theme of dehumanization and pushing humans towards mechanization of their sense of self. Darned good stuff if you want to see pessimistic sf by one of its masters.Currently rereading Going Going Gone by Jack Womack. This is the concluding volume of his amazing Dryco Chronicles, the story of two broken, suffering timelines and the people in them. One is a 21st century where, essentially, the US collapsed and got taken over by ambitious business guys. The other is, in this volume, the 1960s of a world where slavery wasn’t formally abolished till the 1930s, FDR was assassinated in his first term, and people with any fraction of Black ancestry down to about 1/64th are still barred from public life. Now things are getting weirder. I had some ideas for gaming this year involving timeline shifts and decided to reread some relevant stories, starting with this one.</blockquote>

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