“The Interview”
On a dark rainy night his way home from working the night shift, Elio gets off a streetcar and begins the short walk home. From out of the darkness a metallic-sounding voice asks if he would consent to an interview. Purely by chance, Elio has been picked as the human being to have first contact with an alien from another world who has learned to speak all of Earth’s major languages by listening in on television signals that have been shot their way.
“They were Made to be Together”
A love story, of sorts. For the first time in his life, Plato has a date with a girl. Part of the difficulty causing this delay is that he and his family lived on one side a brook which could only be traversed by traveling thirty miles or so around it (there were no bridges) or swimming across it. Plato chooses the latter, the girl tells him her parents won’t be home again all night and they make love in a passage featuring perhaps the most dense figurative language in the entire book. It is a magical union allowing them both to consider a life together. But in the cold reality of post-coital letdown, they mere say their goodbyes and part.
“The Great Mutation”
The story of Isabella, who becomes the first person in a small village to contract a virus which has come to be known as the Major Mutation. First a fever, then itchy skin caused by apparently by a growth of tiny white hairs across the back. Except they aren’t hairs. They are feathers. And the signs of recovery are newly developed wings which allow a person to now take flight.
“Five Intimate Interviews”
Written in the form of a Q&A between a journalist who providing the Q and five fascinating subjects offering the A: a gull, spider, mole, giraffe and a strain of E. Coli. The twist here is that these interview subjects turn out to be not merely bland stereotypes of their individual species, but unique species of individuals who each have their own story to tell with their own peculiarity of traits.
“The Mirror Maker”
The latest in a long line of generational family members who have learned and perfected the craft of making mirrors, Timoteo has discovered a radical way to elevate product to a very unique. He invents a kind of mirror he terms a Metamir. The size of a credit card, it is best worn attached to one’s forehead because its surface reflects not how one looking into the mirror actually appears, but how they appear in the mind of the person looking at them.
“Force Majeure”
A man known only as “M.” is hurrying toward an appointment with the manager of the library when he has a strangely violent encounter with a complete stranger: a sailor and his dog. For the first time in his life, he tries to fight back, but the despite being forced to resort to fighting dirty to defend himself, winds up getting bested, a victim of violence for absolutely no discernible reason. Worst of all is that his efforts to replicate all the models of suggested behavior under such circumstances (from Don Quixote to High Noon) had not only failed but had been sullied by the lack of nobility of the whole entire thing.
“Time Checkmated”
This work of fiction is presented in the form of an application to the Central Patent Office of the Grand Duchy of Nuestria. The invention for which the applicant is seeking a patent is one likely to made him the richest person in the world: a mechanism for controlling how the passage of time feels. So instead of a waiting in line at the bank making five minutes seem like an hour or instead of a five minute long sexual encounter seeming to zip by in the blink of eye, the sensation of time speeding up or slowing down could be reverse at will.
“The Commander of Auschwitz”
This piece kicked off the essays section of the book and bears a profoundly personal mark for the author who for nearly a year was a prison at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The essay was written on upon the news that the person who succeeded Rudolph Hess as commandant at Auschwitz had just been recently been located and arrested. For the author, Richard Baer is a symbol of something that is actually even more horrific than the genuine mad psychopaths whose names all became infamous following the defeat the Nazis. Baer is representative not of the inexplicably soulless malevolence that manifests itself in just a tiny percentage of humanity, but that much larger segment who facilitate the evil that others do by a willingness to simply not resist.
“The Moon and the Man”
The Apollo 8 mission which became the first to put man in orbit around the moon and then bring him home safely inspired a number of writers to offer their two cents on the fundamental philosophical transformation of the human species occasioned by this accomplishment. Levi addresses a utilitarian aspect with far-reaching metaphysical facets. With this long-distance travel covering awe-inspiring lengths of time as well as space, the human race managed to do something almost genuinely superhuman all too easily overlooked: he took a body conditioned specifically to require all the various environment and scientific properties keeping him earthbound to life onto a environment conditioned to kill him instantly and proved that he could survive.
“Jack London’s Buck”
Although ostensibly a review of a newly published translation of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild by Gianni Celati, this is less than book review than a political analysis lending a well-known adventure story a philosophical dimension that likely could only be seen by someone who had lived through a similar ordeal. In the hands of Levi’s reinterpretation, the character of the dog Buck in the story undergoes a tortuous rite of passage and understanding that becomes a metaphor for surviving the experience of being shipped to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany surviving intact to come alive and stronger on the other side.
“Hatching the Cobra”
The final entry in the book is an essay that is essentially a clarion call to scientists to be aware of consequence. Scientific progress is not pure and does not exist in a vacuum. Scientific breakthroughs invariably involve working with governments serving the purpose of creating weapons either for offensive purposes or defensive purposes. Regardless, people will die and in large numbers. He cautions against expectations of “safe” scientific disciplines which will be mostly free from the wily motivations to weaponize.
