Endlessly inventive, delightful and sometimes sad. Calvino takes real scientific theories and twists them into extremely human stories of love, loss and all the things in between. ( )

I reread the book as a novel way to communicate scientific ideas. In reality the book does something different, it transposes the scientific abstraction into the every day and makes for funny paradoxes, absurd relationships between abstracted beings. The fiction is still very much high-culture and actually doesn’t really clarify any of the science but makes for a different kind of fiction.

Sometimes the overall effect is original, fun and rich. Other times the effect is stilted, distant, a bit off putting. In any case a unique experiment in fiction. ( )

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 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. ( )

Original, erudite, shows author's great intelligence and unbounded imagination but...I don't know...pointless? Not to a degree of the Invisible Cities though, but still. Should it not be for the 'Dinosaurs' parable, I would've considered reading it a total waste of time.

Great condensation of everything I love about Calvino, the experimental thought and exploration. ( )