Italo Calvino's story collection takes scientific facts as launching points for imaginative flights, narrated by the immortal Qfwfq who was somehow present at the beginning of the universe and has witnessed everything since. Qfwfq describes what it was like when the moon was so close you could reach up and grab it, when there were no colors until light appeared, when the first amphibians struggled onto land. Calvino, one of the twentieth century's great fabulists, uses contemporary cosmology and physics—the Big Bang, continental drift, evolution—as raw material for stories about love, jealousy, competition, and loss. The cosmic scale makes human emotions simultaneously absurd and universal; our petty concerns existed before there were humans to have them. Calvino's tone is wistful, comic, philosophical—he treats the universe as a neighborhood where familiar dramas play out in unfamiliar settings. The stories demonstrate how science and literature illuminate each other: scientific facts are strange enough to be fantastic, while fantastic literature can make scientific abstractions emotionally comprehensible. Calvino writes with characteristic lightness, a quality he would later theorize in his essays—prose that lifts off from heavy subjects to achieve unexpected grace. Readers encounter both genuine scientific ideas and one of modernism's most distinctive imaginations at play. These stories remain fresh because their combination has never been replicated; Calvino found a form no one else has quite figured out how to occupy.