"The Complete Cosmicomics" by Italo Calvino

Year of Publication: 2009
Introduction:  Martin McLaughlin
Length:  402 pages
Genre:  Science-fiction, fantasy

This collection of linked short stories traces the history of the universe, from the Big Bang, across billions of years and galaxies, as narrated by the "cosmic know it all" Qfwfq, a shape-shifting being who has existed since the beginning of time, in a variety of forms and lives, including an amoeba, a mollusc, a dinosaur, a ship's captain, and a moon-milk gatherer, among others.  The stories usually begin with a brief explanation of a scientific premise (some still accepted, some of which are disproved) and then spin it off into a tale told by Qfwfq to an unidentified listener.  Qfwfq also is just one of a large number of immortal shape-shifters, who make up his family, friends, enemies and lovers, and they all have an all-too-human outlook on the cosmic events they witness and participate in.  Some of the stories do not involve Qfwfq at all, and make up unconnected scientific or post-modern tales, including a hunter at the point of loosing an arrow at a leaping lion, an assassin and his quarry trapped in a stalemate by a traffic jam, and a post modern version of the Alexandre Dumas story The Count of Monte Cristo.

Italian author Italo Calvino began writing the "Cosmicomics" stories in the early 1960s and published them off an on from the 1960s to the 1980s.  The first collection, Cosmicomics was published in 1965 in Italian and 1968 in English, and was followed by t zero (1967, published in English as Time and the Hunter in 1970), and several others were published in different collections in the 1980s.  This book contains all of the stories from Cosmicomics and t zero as well as collecting other stories, some of which had never been published before.  The stories are usually very short, usually between 10 to 15 pages, with the longest being around 38 pages and made up of three interconnected segments.  The stories are often very surreal, sometimes very funny, playful. wildly inventive, some of the stories I found a little inaccessible, but usually they are fantastic short stories.  This is a wonderful book, and beautifully written.