The Constant Change: Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics

Flying forward, looking back

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Throughout much of the 1960s, Italo Calvino – best known in English for his evocative experimental novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler – wrote a series of short stories that could be called science fiction, if the term science fiction were taken more literally. The Cosmicomics each take as their epigraph a purported scientific finding, some true, some false, some invented, and then spin up a whole world in a few pages. Through such a small mechanism, the stories take in the universe. Some are about gravity, or the stars, or the speed of light. The best ones are about the moon. Almost all of them involve unrequited love. The protagonist of the stories—the unpronounceable Qfwfq—shows up just before the Big Bang, watches the matter congealing into planets and stars, witnesses the formation of continents, and—somewhat reluctantly—persists through the evolution of life on land and the growth of human society.