I'm looking for a collection of stories I read back in the early 80s.
Here's what I can remember:
- One story mentions what things were like before the big bang. The space the characters were in was really crowded with piles of stuff everywhere and you couldn't tell what was going to become what. (I seem to remember a line going something like "And you couldn't tell what would become a star and what would become a planet")
- Another story (or perhaps the same one) is set in the early days of the universe. Here the characters play with subatomic particles like kids do with marbles, but the expansion of the universe means fewer new particles are popping up. The narrator gathers some older particles and makes them look shiny and new to fool someone else.
- One story is set in the Cambrian, the narrator is an transitional fish/amphibian, his grandfather a fish and his girlfriend an early amphibian.
- I believe the stories may all have the same narrator (in different incarnations), though I'm not sure about that.
- I believe all the stories were by the same author, though again, I'm not sure.
This was a library book, it was probably published a number of years before I read it.
