Genevieve Cogman - The Invisible Library (2015)

"That was the whole point of the Library: as far as she'd been taught, anyway. It wasn't about a higher mission to save worlds. It was about finding unique works of fiction and saving them in a place out of time and space. Perhaps some people might think that was a petty way to spend eternity, but Irene was happy with her choice. Anyone who really loved a good story would understand."

'The Invisible Library' by Genevieve Cogman is a thoroughly enjoyable Fantasy adventure featuring alternate worlds, a steampunkish setting, great detectives, fairies, dragons, strong female characters and books, not to mention a compelling central concept. In its inventive use of alternate realities as a series of settings for the ongoing conflict between rival forces of order and chaos, it harks back to classic Fantasy works such as 'Three Hearts And Three Lions' by Poul Anderson or Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books. It is held together by its overarching love of fiction, and its steadfast belief in the value and importance of books; that stories are worth preserving because they tell us something important about the culture that produced them, and simply for the joy a good story brings.
   At the centre of 'The Invisible Library' is the Library itself, a vast, interdimensional space that a secret society of immortal dimension-hopping Librarians use to store fiction from alternate realities. It's an inspired creation, drawing on both Borges' infinite library and Edgewood, the house that acts as a portal between the worlds of humans and fairies from John Crowley's 'Little Big'. The Librarians themselves are a classic manipulative secret society, a force on the side of order but filled with dark secrets and arcane power games. Appropriately for a book about libraries, 'The Invisible Library' treats fiction as its playground, cheerfully mixing up Moorcockian Fantasy in its use of alternate dimensions and sinister, chaos-worshiping Fae, the Sherlock Holmes stories beloved of protagonist Irene in the form of the great detective Vale, and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in its steam-powered, Victorian-esque London. There are even elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror in the villain Alberic, a rogue Librarian who has turned to the side of chaos to sustain his immortality. Cogman meshes all these disparate elements together seamlessly, and the book has gonzo invention to spare with its giant mechanical insects and clans of warring werewolves, vampires and fairies. It recalls the mad alchemy of the original steampunk novels by Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K. W. Jeter, rather than the more tired and cynical trappings of the genre that have been overused since.
   In keeping with the book's faith in the power of language, the Librarian's magical powers stem from language itself. The Librarians can speak the Language and force the physical components of reality around them to do their bidding, a literalised form of reification, which links thematically back to Borges. Cogman makes good use of the concept, exploring both the limitations of the technique - you have to phrase your requests very specifically for it to be useful, thus limiting its use as a 'get out of jail free' card for the heroes - and the extent to which it could be abused, in a troubling scene in which Irene uses the Language on a person to hijack an airship.
   As well as an intriguing set-up, 'The Invisible Library' also has well drawn and memorable characters. Vale, the Holmes-esque detective and Kai, Irene's assistant, trainee and secret dragon in human form, are compelling characters, all the more so for having the ability to act against Irene's and each other's interests when appropriate. Much of the philosophical weight of the book comes from Irene's attempts to keep Vale on her side. Vale is a rational and caring person who believes that the Library should use its powers to help people rather than just preserving books. One of the good things about 'The Invisible Library' is that, while the Librarians are unquestionably on the side of order, this does not necessarily mean that they are all good or nice; some of the Librarians will use any means necessary to acquire the books they are after, no matter how damaging the consequences to bystanders. We see this personified in the most interesting relationship in the book, between Irene and her ex-mentor Bradamant. Bradamant cares about completing her mission at any cost, and has thrown Irene under the train in the past to achieve this; as a result, Irene is especially conscious of how her actions affect other people, and wants to do her job without causing harm and to help people on the way if she can. Irene has to prove that she can get results whilst showing Vale that she is ultimately a moral person, unlike Bradamant. Cogman handles Bradamant and Irene's relationship very well; there's no denying that Bradamant is incredibly selfish, manipulative and unpleasant, even going so far as to drug Irene at the climax so that she can finish the job her way without Irene's interference, but she isn't the main villain, and by the end of the book there's a sense that she has learned to respect Irene, whilst Irene, by showing that she is both moral and competent is able to leave behind her hangups about being in Bradamant's shadow.

Italo Calvino - The Complete Cosmicomics (1997)

"What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated. A present doesn't exist, we proceed blindly towards the outside and the afterwards, carrying out an established programme with materials we fabricate ourselves, always the same. We don't tend towards any future, there's nothing awaiting us, we're shut within the system of a memory which foresees no task but remembering itself. What now leads me and Priscilla to seek each other isn't an impulse towards the afterwards; it's the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us. Goodbye, Priscilla, our encounter, our embrace are useless, we remain distant, or finally near, in other words for ever apart."

 "I don't want to boast, but from the start I was willing to bet that there was going to be a universe..."

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer who wanted to write stories that adequately reflected the rapid growth of scientific knowledge in the 20th century. Naturally the stories he produced in this mode, mostly between 1963 to 1968, would be at least somewhat SF-nal in nature. But considering Calvino's pedigree of historical fiction, and the narrative experiments he would go on to make, the result was hardly going to be straightforwardly Campbellian. 'The Complete Cosmicomics' collects every one of what Calvino dubbed his 'cosmicomic' stories, from the previous collections 'Cosmicomics' (1965), 'Time And The Hunter' (1967), 'World Memory And Other Cosmicomic Stories' (1968) and 'Cosmicomics Old And New' (1984). They demonstrate a novel way of combining hard science and the mythic and literary, resulting in a series of exquisitely crafted tales overflowing with enough sensawunda to rival any Golden Age SF classic. Mythic hard SF, if you will.
   The short stories in 'Cosmicomics' introduce us to Qfwfq, the protagonist of pretty much all the cosmicomic stories and a large part of why Calvino's central conceit works as well as it does. Described by Calvino himself as a 'cosmic know-it-all', Qfwfq is an ancient being who is as old as the universe, (or so he claims). In his time, he has been the primordial matter in the big bang before it exploded, unicellular organisms, mollusks, dinosaurs, human beings.... Qfwfq has been around and seen it all, and is not shy about telling you so, with many cheerful diversions. His homespun, folksy tone is paradoxically exactly right for talking about the unknown wonders of existence, as he bitches about supernovae like they were eccentric family members or smirks about coming up with an idea before his fellow bacteria did. The end result is not unlike listening to a cosmic Ronnie Corbit talk about the formation of the universe. In this way, Calvino makes quantum physics and evolutionary biology immediate and relatable, allowing us to experience the world bursting into colour with the formation of the atmosphere in 'Without Colours', contemplate the vast amounts of time taken for a full galactic revolution in 'A Sign In Space', or experience the cramped living conditions before the Big Bang in 'All At One Point'.
   The cosmicomic approach to science is worthy of note. Each story is prefaced with a quote, detailing the scientific concept central to this particular story. But outside of the core concept, Calvino throws scientific accuracy to the wind, allowing the story to play out with a mythic or fairy tale quality, or even with a daffy cartooniness. And so fishermen can climb up poles to reach the moon, Qfwfq can play marbles with atoms or, as a dinosaur, hide in plain sight in front of the mammals, and run around the moon with a pirate as it emerges from the earth. This serves to make sure the stories are always fun, however abstract or complicated the physics gets. However it also allows Calvino to experiment with the narrative structure, as in 'The Origin Of Birds' where he asks the reader to imagine the action happening as in a newspaper comic, with Qfwfq manipulating the edges of the frame to make good his escape. The mythic qualities mean that when Calvino retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as he does more than once here, the mixing of SFnal concepts and ancient myth feels natural as opposed to jarring.
   By 'Time And The Hunter', Calvino's experimentation moves from the realm of mixing language with science to mixing language with maths. The Qfwfq stories in the first section seem almost conventional in light of what follows. 'Priscilla' conceives a love story as the life cycle of a single cell, through the stages of Mitosis, Meiosis and death, whereas the stories in 't zero'  reduce and simultaneously amplify a warrior attacking a lion, a car chase, a man driving to meet his lover before his rival, and Dumas' 'The Count Of Monte Cristo' to mathematical expressions, single crucial moments as vital junctions of possibility. The latter, with Dantes considering Dumas writing 'The Count Of Monte Cristo' as part of his escape plan, is particularly reminiscent of Borges. The same could be said of 'World Memory', which is about reification and the impossibility of objective observation.
   Calvino's cosmicomic stories manage to be fun and entertaining, and at the same time effectively illustrate their central scientific conceits. But there is more to them than that. Throughout them all, with their reiterations of love and loss, and the recurring image of what exists being the mirror image of what does not, a kind of sadness for the path not taken - Qfwfq, for all his love of the new, is prone to fits of nostalgia - serve to give the stories more emotional depth than you might think. Calvino fought in the Italian Resistance during World War II, and 'The Dinosaurs' explores Europe's struggles with the specter of fascism.
   My favourite story in the whole collection is 'The Light-Years', in which Qfwfq sees a sign in a galaxy a hundred million light-years away saying, 'I SAW YOU', and works out that at the time two hundred million years ago when the light they saw him by must have traveled there he was doing something unspeakably embarrassing, and so after much agonising writes back, 'WHAT OF IT?', and then has to wait another two hundred million years for the reply. For me, this perfectly sums up the marriage between humour and high concept that makes these stories so compelling.