SOURCE: “From Estrangement to Commitment: Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics and T Zero,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, July, 1989, pp. 161–83.

In the following essay, Cromphout discusses Calvino's work as science fiction and views the stories of Cosmicomics and t zero as part of a single literary project.

Some of the most remarkable works of Italian SF stand on the margins of the genre—certain of Dino Buzzati's stories, for example, or Primo Levi's Storie Naturali. This generalization applies as well to Cosmicomics (Le Cosmicomiche, 1965) and T Zero (Ti con zero, 1967) by Italo Calvino. Yet Calvino seems to have thought it necessary to discourage labelling him a writer of SF.¹ “The prime difference …,” he writes in the Preface to La Memoria del Mondo (The Memory of the World, 1968), “is that SF deals with the future, whereas each of my narratives refers to a remote past” (“La prima differenza … è che ‘science-fiction...