Andr থেকে 820 43 Ängra, Sweden
The Cosmicomics are remarkable stories. They follow a character called Qfwfq, who seems to be able to take any shape he wants. I actually read these as kind of tall tales, the sort of thing your uncle or father or grandfather would make up to tell you as a bedtime story, as not only does Qfwfq appear as everything from an electron to a camel to a human being, but he also appears in universes with completely contradictory theories of existence. What Calvino was trying to do with these stories was to create a new kind of science fiction - not one focused on what *could be*, as so many of my favorite space operas are, but on what *could have been*. Overall, I think this experiment was successful, even though some of the theories he based his stories on are now considered outdated. (That's kind of not the point, I think.) My only problem with the book is that it is sometimes very dense and hard to read. Calvino loves his flights of fancy and tangents, which I loved in books like If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, but in these shorter works, it can make it all seem very muddled and confusing. In addition, this book is a collection of many Cosmicomics compendiums, some of which contained other short stories that didn't really fit in thematically (imo) with the Cosmicomics stories. Even with those caveats, I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you like to be challenged when you read.