‘The Distance of the Moon’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver

To indulge completely in fantasy, and to risk. By risk I mean to avoid resting in comfort for long, always trying to expand the reaches of what you’re doing, never shying away from the new and untested. In the Cosmicomics Calvino uses scientific hypotheses of the day as jumping-off points, creating a new genre described as “a subspecies of science fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

First published in Italian in 1965. First published in English translation in Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1968. Collected in The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Modern Classics, 2010. Available as an animation, in Hebrew with subtitles here