torsdag den 21. august 2008

Italo Calvino

Cosmicomics is a book of short stories by Italo Calvino. Each story takes a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. An always extant being called Qfwfq narrates all of the stories save two, each of which is a memory of an event in the history of the universe. (Qfwfq also narrates some stories in Calvino's t zero).

Some of the Stories are:

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.

The Light Years
is one story is about Qfwfq looking at other galaxies, and spotting one with a sign pointed right at him saying "I saw you." Given that there's a gulf of 100,000,000 light years, he checks his diary to find out what he had been doing that day, and finds out that it was something he wished to hide. Then he starts to worry.

The Dinosaurs
How some dinosaurs lived after most of them had become extinct, and how it felt to be that last existing dinosaur in an age where all the current mammals feared your kind as demons.

4 kommentarer:

Olga sagde ...

Ha! I dag begyndte jeg at læse en Calvino-bog, jeg har købt i SF. Man skal ikke kimse af universet.

Jeppe sagde ...

fuck hvor skaebne agtigt. Hvilken en?

Olga sagde ...

Invisible cities

Jeppe sagde ...

Det er sjovt. Jeg fik anbefalet den bog af en fyr til en fest i San Francisco igaar. Jeg er saasmaat gaaet i gang med at laese den, men det er svaert naar man har tømmermaend.