Distance of the Mooon and a Presentation of a New Universe

We talked in class that literary speculation is the genre that allows people to understand difficult concepts, many built on a world that people are not so used to. It is a type of science fiction genre that is not explored so much by North American literature, which therefore may be the reason why some people find it ‘weird’.

Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino was a pretty weird story too. The whole short story was built upon the idea that “the moon is accessible with merely a boat and a ladder,” which was pretty confusing at first since we don’t normally think the moon is just a couple of meters away. However the short story includes a lot of explaining done by the protagonist, helping to understand that that is how the world of Distance of the Moon is built.

As a class, we read The Aquatic Uncle by Italo Calvino to explore this particular genre. I found it to be a weird story, and I remember parts of our classroom discussion talking about how weird and messed up the whole world and the plot is: The main character losing his fiancée to none other but his uncle, who is a fish. In The Aquatic Uncle, the protagonist Qfwfq, and his fiancée Lll lives in the usual human world. When Lll gets to know N’ba N’ga, the great ‘fish’ uncle of Qfwfq, she falls in love with him and decides to leave Qfwfq for N’ba N’ga. We as a class discussed that this shows Lll’s fascination for the new world, and I thought this was an element of the story that is also noticeable within Distance of the Moon.

In Distance of the Moon, the moon is a symbolism of a world of an ideal or a fantasy. I thought it reminded me of the green light in The Great Gatsby, a symbol of an ideal that is too perfect that it could never come true. From the beginning of the story, the moon is described to be a valuable place holding ‘Moon-milk’. In the real world, the moon is something that people physically look up to during at night, which makes it a universal symbol of a dream or a wish. In this story, by making the moon accessible it gives the readers the anticipation towards whether the story will end as a ‘dream come true’. However, like The Aquatic Uncle the main protagonist fails to earn the heart of a woman he loves who decides to stay on the moon to become it herself. The symbol of a high ideal using the imagery of the moon emphasizes the fantastical feeling of a new unrealistic world, and by making it accessible Calvino is giving the readers room to absorb the fictional concept of it. By making an impossible concept possible within this particular story, I think that Calvino is achieving a more direct description and symbolism of an ideal. Speculative literature therefore feels like a genre that uses a different world view to achieve a message or a conclusion a new way.