Anna Sibilia

David Steiling 

Journeys Far Beyond

Where Are We Going?

Writing is an unfortunately under appreciated form of art. The amount of skill and technique that goes into eloquent works is a staggering contrast to what many may believe; authors are able to take raw elements of intelligent communication and use them to convey worlds unknown or those which hadn’t been fathomed before. It is a painstaking and deliberate course of planning, editing, suffering, self-defeat, and rapture at the end of a first draft, only to restart the process once the revised content is needed. In order to help the author focus their work, as well as help provide a narrower selection for potential audiences, genres were created as an organizational function; works with similar elements would be classified in the same categories, making everything simpler for an audience to navigate through as well as chose something that piques their respective interests. 

Yet this system also implemented a literary hazard: genre boxing, the act of summarizing innumerable works together into a lumped sum because of an archetype they might fall into. With all the diverse stories out there, it is unjust to state that one can only amount to the full extent of a single element, yet it is common practice today. For example, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, George Lucas’ Star Wars, and Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz can all be summarized as ‘fiction’ though one is clearly fantasy, another is science fiction, and the last is realistic fiction. Since these movies are not based upon true events or practices, they cannot be identified as non-fiction or even historic fictionalizations, and when spoken of in this manner, it can lead one uneducated on the different types of sub-genres to believe that only the most popular elements of a genre are present (I myself didn’t read a book series that featured vampires because I thought that too many elements similar to another would be present). 

This does, however, make it all the more refreshing when authors dream up stories that are harder to define than the norm, especially short stories. With these shorter tales, one must accept that they are, most likely, dropped into the middle of a scenario and cannot go back to the beginning of everything; there isn’t a creation story, the world simply is whether the audience understands it or not and they must read along regardless of how the scenario began. That’s what makes the tale of Distance to the Moon so different, everything is simple and understandable without being boring. It is a tale that is wondrous without being too fantastic, and the characters are the real emblems and themes, not that the setting is a world where the moon visited the Earth. It made the impossible seem trivial, having the actors be the focus though they were interacting with paradoxes and unattainable desires. It is hard to classify this work as anything, for it is so grounded in the longings and hearts of its cast that it would be unfair to say the story is primarily anything. Is it a romance? Well there is unrequited love in it, but it does not focus solely on that topic. Is is a fantasy? The moon descends from the skies to dance across the surface of the Earth, but other than that it is a normal world. Is it science fiction? There isn’t much in the way of interplanetary travel since the people never technically leave Earth  (well, save one) and journey to the stars.

This story is and isn’t, a paradox in it’s own right, and I’m glad that such a cute tale can be so.