Cosmicomics

Calvino’s Cosmicomics is perhaps the funniest and most outlandish collections of short stories I’ve ever come across. Think Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time meets Alice in Wonderland. Starting with the Big Bang and charting the entire evolution of the universe and of life on Earth, Calvino’s narrator shape-shifts from a man, to a dinosaur, to a mollusk, a single-cell organism, a subatomic particle, and even a disembodied being. In this linked collection of modern fairy tales, the author displays wild flights of imagination, combining scientific rigor with an uproarious repudiation of logic. Oh, and the narrator’s name… show more.

This book by the late Italian novelist Italo Calvino is for your mental health. Despite the title, it is not about comics and it is not science fiction. Rather, it is a collection of fanciful and beautifully written short stories which personalize the Universe. In one story, Calvino’s narrator, Qfwfq, explains the crankiness of his family members at the moment the Universe was created. Their short tempers were inevitable because, the creation event being a singularity, they were all crowded together at a single point in space. In another story, Qfwfq remarks that his younger brother was "not of the… show more.

Here is a collection of concatenated science fantasies that construct the universe from the Big Bang, through evolution, and right into the mind’s fascination with itself. The world-building here is alien, rich with poetic logic, and unlimited by the key features of our human mind – reason and facticity. I find this literary freedom an invigorating encounter with the absurdity of the cosmos, which lies directly behind the scientific scrim of our very limited awareness of existence. Whenever I feel constricted in my world-building efforts by the boundaries of my own imagination, I read a Cosmicomic – and I’m liberated!