SOURCE: “Cosmogony, Cosmography, and the Cosmicomical Stories,” in Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 57–75.

In the following essay, Hume considers Cosmicomics a turning point in Calvino's fiction, maintaining that the author finds his narrative voice and cosmic vision with the stories in this volume.

According to the calculations of the physicist Alan Guth of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the universe originated literally from nothing in an extremely brief fraction of time: a second divided by a billion billion billions. (From the Washington Post, 3 June 1984)

Secondo i calcoli del fisico Alan Guth, dello Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, l'Universo ha avuto origine letteralmente dal nulla in una frazione di tempo estremamente breve: un secondo diviso per un miliardo di miliardi di miliardi. (Dal Washington Post, 3 giugno 1984)

(“Il niente e il poco”, 209)

With this paraphrase of the Washington Post, Calvino commences one of his latest cosmicomical stories, “Il...