No particular theory is definitively advanced for the fall of the dinosaurs in “The Dinosaurs,” but Qfwfq is the very last of them. Much of the new population hates and fears him, calling him the Ugly One. His few friends are some fern flowers. Eventually, Qfwfq’s clear obsolescence overtakes him and he disappears. Cosmicomics is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. Each story takes a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it.

Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana. His father Mario was an agronomist who had spent a number of years in tropical countries, mostly in Latin America. Calvino’s mother Eva, a native of Sardinia, was also a scientist, a botanist. Shortly after their son’s birth, the Calvinos returned to Italy and settled in Liguria, Professor Calvino’s native region. As Calvino grew up, he divided his time between the seaside town of San Remo, where his father directed an experimental floriculture station, and the family’s country house in the hills, where the senior Calvino pioneered the growing of grapefruit and avocados. The images of fortunaand chance recur quite frequently in your fiction, from the shuffling of the tarot cards to the random distribution of manuscripts. Does the notion of chance play a role in the composition of your works? Although narrated in the third person, Watership Down deserves inclusion and its author Richard Adams kudos for originality. Told from the point of view of its leporine protagonists (Adams has created an entire civilization for them), this is the epic story of a society of rabbits and their search for a safe new home. As with child narrators, so too anthropomorphic heroes and heroines have become increasingly popular in recent years, most recently Laline Paull won acclaim for The Bees (2014), a dystopian thriller set in a beehive, as seen through the eyes of Flora 717, a lowly worker bee. Much of the novel’s dialogue is written in Cantonese, but one of the protagonists insists on speaking Mandarin all the time, even though she struggles with it. The character’s shoddy grasp of the language is reflected through dialogue written in a non-standard Mandarin that’s slightly off. These linguistic shifts are fascinating from a reader’s perspective, but from a translator’s viewpoint, I have to come up with creative ways to reflect this juxtaposition in English. The book is kinda like this: think of five or six hella great popular science writers, turn them into short-story writers, let it have the feel of Marvel or DC cosmic-stage stories, and then have it feel right at home with Neil Gaiman's Sandman.JF: You are the director of Spicy Fish Cultural Production Ltd. Can you introduce Spicy Fish’s mission and some of your projects?

Without Colors": Before there was an atmosphere, everything was the same shade of gray. As the atmosphere appears, so do colors. The novelty scares off Ayl, Qfwfq's love interest. The Distance of the Moon", the first and probably the best known story. Calvino takes the fact that the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth, and builds a story about a love triangle among people who used to jump between the Earth and the Moon, in which lovers drift apart as the Moon recedes. Do you begin with a small group of unrelated ideas or a larger conception that you gradually fill in? Personally, I’ve noticed affinities between her work and the writings of Dung Kai-cheung, Hon Lai-chu, and Dorothy Tse in how they blur the real and the fantastic. I also see Xi Xi’s influence in Wong Yi’s work, particularly her use of defamiliarization and the childlike wonder with which some of her characters approach the world, such as in her short story collection The Four Seasons of Lam Yip. What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq. Thus "All at One Point" begins:

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Through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written I'm not joking. It's really that good and that odd. And while the science bits and how it's written is very heavy in a way, I don't think it overwhelms the actual stories at all. It's unusual and it's very smart, but I wouldn't let that deter you from reading it. Indeed, I think everyone should read this and have it be a solid staple of the mind.

LL: Hong Kong writers have long been experimenting with using both our spoken and written language in their work, and I believe this will continue. Aside from fiction writers, Hong Kong poets also incorporate Cantonese and many modes of language into their writing to convey a sense of playfulness, modernity, and sometimes sarcasm, creating a unique postcolonial voice. Some examples include Quanan, Yam Gong, and Choi Yim-pui. Yeah, that is something like my reading experience of this book, that punch definitely signifies Calvino’s ‘over-creativity’. Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . .This is the first complete edition in English of Italo Calvino's funny, whimsical and delightful stories, which blend scientific fact, flights of fancy, parody and wordplay to show the strangeness and the wonders of the world.