Invisible Cities

What Hacker News says

1. uludagOct 2026
   Invisible Cities is my favorite piece of literature hands down. The audiobook narrated by Richard Higgins is also done so beautifully and can't recommend it more.

   As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.

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2. dvtOct 2026
   Apologies for the long post in advance (maybe I should turn this into a blog post).

   Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books, and I've re-read it several times. It's a great "travel" read and always puts me in the mood to explore. It's also a very romantic book, obviously the cities have all named after women, so it evokes conquest in the sexual sense as well. It's also a piece of surrealist/allegorical literature in the same vein as Daumal's Mount Analogue (which also tops my list).

   Back to the website. While this is an impressive tech demo (as they all are), it's clear that AI misses the forest for the trees, and here's a tangible example. I randomly clicked on Theodora. Honestly, I didn't even remember which city this was until I re-read the Calvino passage:

   > Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.

   So, what do we know about this city? We can make a short sensible list:

       1. It's an imperialistic (or at least millitaristic) reflection of man's will to power (as Nietzsche might put it)
       2. It's decidedly anti-nature, the natural flora and fauna being its primary antagonist
       3. It's been destroyed and rebuilt many times
       4. The city is built by literally ripping away bugs and birds; tearing their wings from their bodies like a cruel child might
       5. Nature is slowly winning (and maybe it already has)
   

   This[1] is what AI saw. Now, this isn't bad, really. But it's so embarassingly pedestrian, it hardly counts as a visualisation. It just heard "city with animals and stuff" and made a 3D model. But it's all, in that uncanny-valley kind of feeling, wrong. Why is the city itself a grid? Why is there a library in the center?

   Calvino, again, on Theodora:

   > But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man's posession of the city: the rats.

   The vibe here is an overrun rat's nest of a city. A disgusting bloated corpse; more:

   > The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs.

   I see an overrun New York. I see a city built on a decaying graveyard. AI sees animals and humans living in a kumbaya harmony, but that is not what Theodora is: it's an eternal conflict between man and nature (and nature won a long time ago). For the record, this isn't even that particularly deep. Many authors and poets write about this eternal human struggle: the taming of the wilds. But Claude just doesn't get it. I hope readers of the book do.

   Anyway, I leave you with this. I found an artist, Rian Hotton[2], who put brush to canvas to show us what he thought Theodora looks like[3]. And this... this is more like it.

   [1] https://imgur.com/a/hXrKVg3

   [2] https://www.facebook.com/rianhottonartist

   [3] https://imgur.com/a/tR0qTYx

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3. roughlyMay 2025
   If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks.

   From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.

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4. dvtMay 2025
   > Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”

   So wild seeing this referenced here, it's a pretty obscure book (of poetry nonetheless), and one my absolute favorites. Cheers to having great taste :)

   PS: Small nit: it's "Italo," not "Italio."

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5. anddtApr 2025
   Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
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6. monkeypicksDec 2023
   Fiction:

   Victory City- new Salman Rushdie book. Great retelling of the history of one of the great medieval South Indian kingdoms. Not his best, but his writing is still top notch.

   Sea of Tranquility- speculative fiction from Emily St. John Mandel (of Station Eleven fame). It's a series of interconnected stories spanning centuries from the near past to the near future. Beautifully written. Read when I was down with COVID earlier this year and it invaded my dreams (in a good way). Short and easy read.

   Giovanni's Room- story of an American expat in Paris caught between his love for a man and his duty to his girlfriend. This is the first James Baldwin book I have read but will definitely check out more of his work in 2024.

   Theory of Bastards- speculative fiction by Audrey Schulmann. Literary sci-fi similar to Station Eleven. It's about a woman researching primate behavior set in the near future where the earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change. Very well researched, beautifully written and nothing like I have ever read before. This won the 2019 Philip K Dick Award.

   Invisible Cities- literary fiction by Italo Calvino. It's less than 200 pages but a very dense and tough read. It's a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan where MP is describing cities in KK's vast empire. It's a strange, strange book that I think I will return to often. If you liked the world building in Piranesi and want more, this is the book for you. Calvino describes 55 cities in under 200 pages, with each one feeling very different. Again, first Calvino book I have read and will definitely check out more of his works in 2024.

   Non-fiction:

   Thinking in Systems: A Primer- by Donella Meadows. Read this based on HN's recommendation. Thank you!

   On Intelligence- by Jeff Hawkins. This was on my shelf for years and am glad I got to read it this year. The creator of the Palm Pilot presents his theory of intelligence and how the brain works. It's compelling. I hope to read his follow up book in 2024. Would love HN's recommendations of similar books.

   A Primate's Memoir- by Robert M. Sapolsky. Enjoyable read of the author's research on Savannah baboons and his adventures in Africa. His love for primates and humans alike come through clearly.

   Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making- by Tony Fadell. A great business book by the co-founder of Nest. Draws on his experience both as a startup founder and leading innovative teams at large tech companies (Apple, in his case). Just as any business book, this could have been shorter and less repetitive but thankfully, there is enough good material here to be a book rather than a blog post.

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