The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin Modern Classics)

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An unnamed narrator falls through space in “The Form of Space,” but the fall is unlike any that the gravitational force of Earth can produce. A drama ensues with other falling beings, namely his love interest Ursula H’x, and his rival for her affections, Lieutenant Fenimore. The contours of their falling trajectories become the contours of their love triangle, but they never meet. The Aquatic Uncle": A tale on the fact that at one stage in evolution animals left the sea and came to live on land. The story is about a family living on land that is a bit ashamed of their old uncle who still lives in the sea, refusing to come ashore like "civilized" people.

What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. Thus "All at One Point" begins: Translator Martin McLaughlin explains the origins of the seven new stories in his introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics:

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Note, please, the sardines. They are characteristic of and essential to Calvino's method and style. The story unfolds from this opening perfectly logically - at least if your definition of logic includes, as surely it should, not only modern astrophysics but Zeno's paradox, Borges' Aleph, and the Mad Hatter's tea party. Opening with a masterful sequence out of hard science-fiction’s classic repertoire – a vivid depiction of an interstellar spaceship’s landing on an alien planet to investigate the mystery of another crew’s demise – this novel weaves together memorable futuristic battles with an intriguing quest for understanding that shakes conventional, anthropocentric assumptions about intelligence and evolution.

Calvino was born in Cuba and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. Without Colors: Before there was an atmosphere, everything was the same shade of gray. As the atmosphere appears, so do colors. The novelty scares off Ayl, Qfwfq's love interest. Do you begin with a small group of unrelated ideas or a larger conception that you gradually fill in?

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With Calvino every word had to be weighed. I would hesitate for whole minutes over the simplest word— bello(beautiful) or cattivo(bad). Every word had to be tried out. When I was translating Invisible Cities, my weekend guests in the country always were made to listen to a city or two read aloud. Wong Yi’s recent Cantonese chamber opera libretto (music composed by Daniel Lo), Women Like Us, was adapted from two of Xi Xi’s short stories “A Woman Like Me” and “The Cold.” In translating the surtitles for the opera, I found myself not only rereading Xi Xi’s stories but also falling down numerous rabbit holes related to the multiple intertextual references Xi Xi makes in both works. Wong Yi’s libretto inscribes new meanings onto these stories, changing the characters’ fates. In her forthcoming short fiction collection Ways to Love in a Crowded City, Wong Yi also rewrites “The Cold” as a short story set in the present day, updating Xi Xi’s tragic love story for the twenty-first century—for example, whereas Xi Xi’s story alludes to classical Chinese poetry, Wong Yi’s adaptation cites contemporary Cantonese pop songs. Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . . The Form of Space: As the unnamed narrator "falls" through space, he cannot help but notice that his trajectory is parallel to that of a beautiful woman, Ursula H'x, and that of lieutenant Fenimore, who is also in love with Ursula. The narrator dreams of the shape of space changing, so that he may touch Ursula (or fight with Fenimore).