A collection of 12 short stories that appear to be thinly related to one another.

The Distance of the Moon: 7.5

A story about a monkey paw love quadrangle involving the moon, whose orbit comes near enough to earth that people can jump freely from a ship to the moons surface. The captain desires to be rid of his bitch wife. The bitch wife yearns to be the object of attention of the deaf one. The deaf one just loves the moon and wants what's best for her, and the narrator wants to captain bitch wife. Each achieves what he wants, and the folly of their desire is realized. Curiously, none of the characters' names have vowels in them making them utterly unpronounceable. Curious.

At Daybreak 7.6

Okay wow, whole lot of zane for so few pages. We get a bit more exposition and confirmation that the stories are in fact connected. The narrator is confirmed to be the confusingly named Qfwfq introduced in the first sentence of the first story, and we learn of his family who are also challengingly named. For instance, Qfwfq's sister is called G'd(w)^n where the n is an exponent of the function G'd(w).

The premise of this story is the creation, or rather, the coagulation of the universe, with the common theme being that it's awfully hard to describe things that have yet to manifest as things. The characters struggle with their own anthropomorphization, as prepositions don't really make any type of relational sense in the spacious void.

The book dates is self and is doubly humorous in so few nonsensical pages with excerpts like:

He was never very clear on this point; that is, he told stories, as they occurred to him, and when the period came when nickel was formed and nobody talked of anything but nickel, he said: "That's it: it was nickel. I was playing with some nickel!" So afterwards he was always called "Nickel Rwzfs." (It wasn't, as some say now, that he had turned into nickel, unable -- retarded as he was -- to go beyond the mineral phase; it was a different thing altogether, and I only mention this out of love for truth, not because he was my brother: he had always been a bit backward, true enough, but not of the metallic type, if anything a bit colloidal; in fact, when he was still very young, he married an alga, one of the first, and we never heard from him again.)

And finally, the book plunges further into absurdism by grounding itself (pun intended) with a conclusion about how Qfwfq reconnects with his sister in 1912 having married a certain Sullivan. Like wtf, are these characters celestial metaphors or not???

I am intrigued

A Sign in Space : 7

This one is a bit more philosophical still. It seems as though we're passing backwards in time rather than forwards with each successive story, regressing towards something even more primordial than a Big Bang. The narrator circle the center of the galaxy at a pace of one revolution per 200 million years. To measure the distance/time he creates a sign. But the creation of a thing in the cavernous void of space where there are no things gives him/things identity. He defines a point and what it means to be a point (there are infinite points, but in "naming" one with his sign, it becomes a place). He immediately (or rather, over the course of hundreds of millions of years) also experiences an identity crisis as he forgets what made his sign unique and therefore a sign in the first place. That thing which set his existence apart from all the rest of the nothingness he's orbiting. He passes the place at which he thought he should've made it back to his sign, having forgotten even its construction since it had been so long and there was nothing to even compare it to as there was not yet any thing else at all. He encounters a counterfeit which he attributes to an annoying foe of his a few lightyears or hundreds of thousands of lightyears ahead of him in orbit. This consonant enemy starts making more imitation signs, and erasing the narrator's sign (the enemy is a projection of his future self). As he continues the orbits, losing place of his own sign and identity, woefully trying to recreate his first sign, the universe becomes a continuous mess of signs, and gains its own identity which both defeats the purpose of making a sign in the first place as a definitive point of reference.

Also funny metaphors about how fast he moves, and how fast the universe spins (like a horse galloping across nebulae, or like an omellete swirling in a pan) after going to great lengths to describe how indescribable his sign was because it was the first thing that ever was to begin with, and "to what shall i compare thee."

All at One Point: 4.5

Getting a bit bored of the gimmick of the nonsensical names, and the existentialism. Tagliatelle in one dimension is cute, but this falls short of the other stories.

Without Colors: 6

Similar to Sodom and Gomorroah or Persephone and Hades. The Yin to Qwfwq's yang exists in the world w/o color. Some interesting anthropological themes bout language, and love. then she dies

Games Without End: 7.75

"The envy of the whole firmament," Qwfwq and Pfwfp playing marbles against each other with sheer matter and stockpiling is funny and fun plot/ Then the conflict and natural advancement to "fable" status

The Aquatic Uncle: 8.5

Gets cucked, evolution, love, family, and identity all packed into one. Very good

How Much Shall We Bet: 8.25

More fun and whimsy that's on-brand for the premises of these short stories in the sci-fi backdrop.

Prop bets fro the void with an oaf who can't even conceive of the future existence of earth, let alone which direction one Maria will step on a specific date/time/location billions of years out into the future. Again, glossing over the nitty gritty of what the characters are, we fast forward to the massive debts realized by Qfwfq after losing a bet due to Arsenal/Real Madrid.

The Dinosaurs: 7

More crisis of identity wherein a Qfwft starts as a dinosaur and rejects his ancestry when he tries to fit in. Then he becomes resentful of the New Ones once they start to express the way that he himself feels about his own differences as a dinosaur. Pretty much he's always on step behind the curve and just dissatisfied with himself.

The Form of Space: 5.0

too honry 5 me. Nothing additive to this one

The Light Years: 9.00

Funniest story yet – with a quick and easy to grokk gimmick that continues to pay dividends. I think this story is what I had hoped most of them would be like, but it too nearly overstays its welcome and repeats the same jokes.

THE SPIRAL: 6.25

THIS GUY IS A FREAK!

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