Qfwfq’s opener is wonderful: Naturally we were all there – where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. My favorite story in Cosmicomics – I think everyone’s favorite story – is the third one, called “All in One Point,” spun off from the fact that, in the Big Bang theory that follows from Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe, at one time all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. But his friend Pfwfp cheated he would sneak out at night and find new atoms, and then rub and scuff them so they looked like old atoms, so Qfwfq would not realize that he was secretly building up his playing stock. The kids played with them, because they were the only things in the universe to play with, and made up elaborate marble games for themselves. Qfwfg begins: I was only a child, but I was aware of it – I was acquainted with all the hydrogen atoms, one by one, and when a new atom of hydrogen cropped up, I noticed it right away. Qfwfq – the narrator in all the stories – then proceeds to tell us what life was like when the Moon at her closest hung ten feet away, and they would go out in rowboats with ladders and climb to the Moon and back, and how traumatic it was when it became apparent that the Moon was receding.Īnother story begins with a (now discarded) conclusion from the Steady State theory of Fred Hoyle and others that, as the universe expands, new matter, in the form of hydrogen atoms, must be continuously created at the rate of one atom every 40 cubic centimeters every 250 million years. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.” Immediately thereafter, the narrator jumps in: How well I know! – old Qfwfq cried, – the rest of you can’t remember, but I can.
Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Each story is prefaced with a brief paragraph stating a cosmological fact, such as the one that opens the first story: “At one time, according to Sir George H. It consists of 12 stories, unrelated plot-wise, but very much fitting under the same skewed rubric. Palomar (1985), all by Italo Calvino, author’s copies (photo by the author) First English editions of t zero (1969), Cosmicomics (1968), and Mr.
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