Book excerpt: García Márquez and Arthur C. Clarke meet for coffee. “One Billion Faces” brings to life the unexpected entanglement of fantastic realism and hard science fiction. In a collection of seven short and ten flash stories, Mario Barbatti invited us to contemplate the extremes of the human condition. Either delving into the psychology of some of the founding myths of the western culture or speculating about our place in the universe on unthinkable time scales, “One Billion Faces” is a profound imagination journey. The amazements and frights of the near future, the superation of all human limits within thousands of years, the wonders of our descendants millions of years from now, the reemergence of life after all stars are burnt, these are some of the themes carefully crafted into the absorbing stories of this book.