Cosmicomics

Cosmicomics is a collection of fanciful short fiction inspired by scientific quotes, which flower into metaphors for something more human than what forumulae and calculations can encompass. Measurable distance becomes emotional distance, cosmic clashes become mere one-upmanship, etc. On the one hand these seem like the lazy mental exercises of a child-like imagination. On the other, I could not similarly write a 12-page compelling story about what it would feel like to be a mollusk. It is the personification that makes it work, makes the science relateable in terms of human emotion. I could feel the science, not just understand it.

Unlike most anthologies or collections, these really ought to be read together as a whole since they all show more bear the same peculiar style. The first paragraph of each story, italicized and devoted to a scientific fact or theory, is key to establishing the context of what follows. This bit of grounding makes it possible to follow Calvino's imaginative forays, whether it is into impossible spaces like the single point that presaged the Big Bang or inside the mind of the last dinosaur. The imagery can be startling, and the metaphors are all built-in.

My personal favourites are 'How Much Shall We Bet?' and 'The Dinosaurs', but the first story 'The Distance to the Moon' (an inspiration for Pixar's "La Luna") is that of most readers. If its magic reaches you then carry on. Otherwise you'd best stop there because it will only get more strange, albeit strangely wonderful. show less

Now that's good Calvino. Funny, detailed, multi-layered, beautifully written and ever so clever without losing track of the story it tells.

On one level, this is a story about a... let's call him a man, because he's definitely male even if he isn't really human, an eternal being named Qfwfq. It's his life, from childhood to maturity. Only his life takes place over the entire age of the universe, from Big Bang to the 1960s on Earth. Each story builds on some scientific factoid, and then creates a very human-although-not-human story from it with Qfwfq as the narrator. Sometimes he's a dinosaur, sometimes he's a bodiless cosmic being watching as the universe creates itself... or if HE creates it?

Because on another level, this is a story show more about what IS. And HOW it is. How we create the world by seeing it, experiencing it, how others create images of us and how others' images of us help us create ourselves. How telling stories can bring things into being. We all create our own universe, we all evolve, and the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz. show less

Qwfwq personifies nebular matter, or tiny amoebas, or mathematical concepts to reveal certain emotional truths. In the first story some characters are caught halfway in between the gravitational pulls of the earth and the moon and must literally chose between two worlds. In another a mollusk possesses as rich a sensory and poetic internal life as anyone else because he can intuit the world around him through the contents of the ocean secretions he consumes.

I felt like Qwfwq was less a trillion-year-old shapeshifter and more an old man full of tall tales. So when you brought up a fact in your science textbook like time and space itself is curved, he'll respond with "not just curved but notched and pocketed, one time me and a beautiful show more woman were free-falling through empty space and we landed in one of those pockets and let me tell you things got steamy in there!"

Which brings me to the best joke about Cosmicomics: how horny old Qwfwq is. He's been around for trillions of years and witnessed godlike perspectives but a good majority of these stories are about his attempts to win over another proto-amphibiod, or chunk of stellar dust, or she-mollusk who is both inexplicably female and the most beautiful thing in the galaxy. show less

What a marvelous book. Calvino has an amazing knack for illuminating the most basic and complex of human emotions—jealousy, pride, embarrassment, love—via crazy stories of planetary births, evolution and galaxy formation. Who knew falling through space, or jumping onto the moon, or being a dinosaur could be explained in such an every-day, shoulder-shrugging, oddly profound way.

I read the last story to a lover last night.

The form for the short stories in this book is that Calvino takes one of man’s latest findings about the universe or evolution, states it in the first paragraph, and then builds a creative, impossible story around it, narrated by a being called ‘Qfwfq’, and including others with mathematical or scientific type names, such as Dean (k)yK, or Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0.

These intelligent, human like beings inhabit space particles or live hundreds of millions of years, and yet have foibles like little attractions and jealousies, or needing to scratch themselves on the early grainy matter of the solar system. Children will play marbles with atoms along spacetime’s curves. A newly evolved creature on land will argue with the old Uncle who believes show more that land-living is going to be a ‘limited phenomeon’. Two beings will bet on events in the early universe, starting with supernova formation and then quickly getting into mundane things in mankind’s history on the earth, begging the question whether what we do is pre-ordained or not. Observers on earth and distant planets will communicate with signs that take 100 million years to reach one another. A sightless mollusk will make the eyes of others possible, and ‘see’ his loved one through the images collected by those eyes.

In short, in all this dancing across time and space, anything is possible, and the stories are uniquely playful. While the concepts and names sound nerdy, there is a lightness throughout Calvino’s writing. In making his characters transcend the limitations we humans are bound to, he seems to gently point out how small we are in the universe, but at the same time how One we are with it, and to each other. show less

I first read this in high school, having enjoyed Calvino's Mr. Palomar, and I found this book even more to my liking. On this reread, it strikes me that though I suspect no one would classify this book as science fiction, the book reminds me of nothing so much as the robot fables of Stanislaw Lem, as depicted in The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines-- Calvino uses ostensibly scientific jumping-off points to tell stories that, despite usually being about strange creatures from the dawn of the universe, are actually about people and all their quirks and foibles writ large. My favorite in the collection remains "The Light-Years", which I once read aloud in Science Fiction Club, a highly amusing look at the lengths one man takes to preserve his show more reputation with observers in distant galaxies. (originally written December 2007) show less

Ah.

Well.

Nothing like I expected. Sweeter. There was a type of innocence that I didn't anticipate, and I'm hoping that this feeling continues through Calvino's other work because it is (...I hate this word...) refreshing and, therefore, exciting. Exciting, too, that I've never read anything like this before. I suppose this could boil down to science fiction, but it didn't feel like any encounter I've had before with sci-fi. Because I have a less than cursory knowledge of physics (etc.), I was able to suspend judgement and let Calvino wind through his interpretation of fables on how to cope with a rapidly (dismally slowly?) evolving universe. Qfwfq often made me laugh aloud, which is something I suprisingly don't often do while reading, show more and I loved that each story dealt with utterly human longings despite the fact that there aren't really any human entities within these pages. One or two of the stories toward the end didn't quite keep the momentum for me as the others, but this feels irrelevant to me considering the beauty of this work as a whole.

Ah. I'm hooked. show less