Cosmicomics is a phantasmagoria on Creation, an enchantingly ingenious idea which translates theories about the evolution of the Universe into stories and makes "characters" out of mathematical formulas and simple cellular structures. The narrator, Qfwfq, spends his childhood in the soundless, timeless void; among the incandescent colors of stellar explosions, he plays with hydrogen atoms like marbles and, sitting astride a galaxy, chases his friend Pfwfp around the firmament. Or, as an adolescent on the new Earth, he has his first shy love affairs with Ayl, Lll, and Mrs. Vhd Vhd; climbs up to the moon on a ladder as it looms hypnotically bright over him; watches the planet flood with its first color as an atmosphere forms; migrates as an adventurous young vertebrate from sea to land; or wanders the deserted plateaus as the last, lonely dinosaur, desperately wanting to belong. Most dazzling of all. Qfwfq thinks back on his state as a mollusk evolving, eyeless himself, a shell to delight all eyes.
The result of this entrancing union of mathematics and poetic imagination is pure delight. But more than this: the infinities of time and space contract, becoming momentarily acceptable to the finite mind, and the reader glimpses his own infinitesimal significance as part of the complex vastness of the cosmos.

from: Italo Calvino.

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