Week 13: Literary Speculation - Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

     This week I decided to read Cosmicomics in its entirety since Italo Calvino has been a writer that has caught my attention in the last few years. The reason being that I had read many excerpts of his novel Invisible Cities and even based one of my school projects on it. His writing always seems to bring something new to the table and makes the reader think differently meanwhile having a story that is easy to understand compared to the other books I have had to read in this course. 

Cosmicomics includes many different short stories which somewhat follow a protagonist named Qfwfq. Qfwfq goes through different scenarios where Calvino explores how life began or changes meanwhile at the same time poking fun at it. For example, during “All at One Point” he mentions on how we all existed all at the same time in one point before the big bang and how we were basically all each other's annoying neighbors. This comedic perspective makes this scientific theory a lot easier to digest. This humor is seen throughout the different stories such as Aquatic Uncle where Calvino express how our characters were originally fishes and after the evolution it is modern to live on land. Qfwfq expresses how embarrassing it is to have an uncle who still lives on water yet at the end his wife is taken away by his uncle as she is grows to have a great interest on the aquatic uncle. It feels like our protagonist gets visited by karma multiples times since a similar scenario happens in “The Distance of the Moon” where he also loses the opportunity to be with his love interest.  

Overall, throughout these stories we see Qfwfq just moves from one situation to the next as he makes bet on how the universe self regulates or being the very last dinosaur. Each story seems to explore a different part of science fiction as it speculates more into the moral and culture inside those theories rather than the math behind it. By having some comedic moments one can relate and understand what is going on as well as speculate with Calvino. Cosmicomics truly is an interesting series of short stories that I recommend to all who like episodic stories that are somewhat connect to the other and are meant to just be experienced rather than to obsess over. 

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