📚APR 2026 Cosmicomics #2 AT DAYBREAK

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino translated by William Weaver, collection first published 1965.

Discussion links:
Introduction
The Distance of the Moon
At Daybreak (This page)
A Sign in Space
All at One Point
Without Colors
Games Without End
The Aquatic Uncle
How Much Shall We Bet?
The Dinosaurs
The Form of Space
The Light-Years
The Spiral
Final Thoughts

I'm loving this book. It's a mash of real cosmic science and comic literature. Huh, just like the title says.

We now jump back in time, going back to before first short story when earth was fully formed and the moon was close to us. In this story we are at the formation of our solar system when the entity Qfwfq was a boy, living in a gaseous nebula with his family: father Uff, mother, Granny Bb'b, sister--I don't think I can do her name here as notated in the book--G'd(w) to the power of n, infant brother Rwzf, and the unnamed twins. Also Mr. Hnw and some unnamed visiting gauche relatives.

Their lives were lived in complete darkness and centuries had passed that way. The family mostly slept and relaxed in this gaseous nebula, having learned somehow to keep near one another.

Until something happened. Something felt uncomfortable. Something the mother was the first to feel, like the Princess and the Pea.

And then it was my brother Rwzf, an infant at the time; at a certain point I felt him--who knows?--slamming or digging or writhing in some way, and I asked: "What you doing?" And he said, "I'm playing."
"Playing? With what?"
"With a thing," he said.
You understand? It was the first time. There had never been things to play with before.

The nebula proceeds into chaos for its inhabitants. Their world is changing. They feel things they had never felt before, somewhat unpleasantly. They are going through all the phases of the Nebular Theory that explains the formation of solar systems like our own.

They experience extreme cold. Then they see some light. And heat. And the space around them expands. The visiting relatives don't fair as well as Qwfwq's family during these events but even Qwfwq's family loses a member, his sister, who is gobbled up in the molten heat of the emerging planet Earth.

I never found out if she had stayed buried in the depths or whether she had reached safety on the other side until I met her, much later, at Canberra in 1912, married to a certain Sullivan, a retired railroad man, so changed I hardly recognized her.

What?! That cracks me up. We also learn that little brother Rwzfs later married an alga, "one of the first," and Mr. Hnw was first introduced as "the one who later became a horse." It's all surreal. And I love it. It fits perfectly with the concept, which seems to be: let's imagine what if there were entities who witnessed the formation of the Universe but, like the Greek Gods on Olympus, had lots of too familiar human-like peccadillos and quirks. If you think about it, the Greek myths were rather surreal, too.

After experiencing the chaos, the fear, the danger, they found

...we were all burning in the fire. Or rather: we weren't burning, we were immersed in it as in a dazzling forest; the flames shot high over the whole surface of the planet, a fiery air in which we could run and float and fly, and we were gripped by a new kind of joy

i have a feeling the four astronauts of Artemis II might be feeling the same way at this very moment

It's fun to go on to find explanation for the science that the stories are illustrating. Like these videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIDGL7R9uI&t=310s 6 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCkhEu3lYNc&t=3s 3 minutes
or if you can tolerate the History channel's near-tabloid-like presentations, there is this 45 minute video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X40Re7j1WlI
Then if you continue to fall down the rabbit hole, how about this fascinating video
"To Scale: THE SOLAR SYSTEM" where the narrator says, "To build a scale model of the solar system with the earth the size of a marble, you need 7 miles of empty space." Then he and the team proceed to do just that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg&t=413s 7 minutes

@AnishaInkspill I hope this is an enjoyable read for you. I think of you the whole time I'm reading and wonder what you are making of it.

>3 DebiCates: This book (which I’ve finished and getting my thoughts together) has definitely been an intriguing read, like with this story, when I read this one a few days back I can see there was more here than I was able to absorb, and I probably should have read this after reading the second chapter of Bang: The Complete History of the Universe (which I’m currently reading), as it was only then that I clocked how dark it would be.

>4 AnishaInkspill: Oh you are done! I look forward to your thoughts. I've been googling the concepts ones by one. I have previously been interested in cosmic theories so not everything has been new to me, but certainly many of the details are that Calvino incorporates.

Me, I'm plodding along (too many irons in the fire). I have finished the third chapter that I found that even more heavy on the abstract.

I will continue to write up my thoughts per each chapter. Because I enjoy this book, I enjoy doing that. It helps me think things out, double-check my reading and get more enjoyment out of it.

I've been trying to find a current review by a scientist type, to get their thoughts on the book. Wouldn't that be interesting?

>5 DebiCates: well, I'm not sure I'm done and will come back to this when I have read more. My thoughts / review are on my page in this group https://www.librarything.com/topic/376281#9172833

The opening of this story mentions G P Kuiper, my astronomy book has an entry for 'Kuiper's belt' (named after an astrophysics Gerard Kuiper), this is dated 1951, my copy says Cosmocomics was published in 1968. In another story quasars are mentioned, when I looked that up I noticed that was dated only a few years earlier from Cosmocomics publication date, so yes it would be interesting to find that review.

I tend to write notes as well, this does help me, and has helped me to make sense of what I have so far of this but I'm also left with a sense that I've missed a lot.

But I'll keep reading your posts and add what I can.