To my mind this is pure science fiction: uncontaminated by plot or character or spaceships or robots or sexy other-worldly women who want to know about the "Earth thing called love..."
There's the local and the distant, the distant is by definition alien... But equally if you merely struggle up onto the shoreline and dip your toes in the water, you are already touching the near edge of infinity.
There's a real sense in the opening of From Lark Rise to Candleford that to many of the locals, Oxford is as far away as the moon...
I wonder what it's like to stand on the moon? White dust... Stars...
From Lark Rise by Standard Candles
With a calibrated period-luminosity relation astronomers
could use Cepheid variables as standard candles to determine
the distances to distant clusters and even other galaxies.
-- www.astronomynotes.com, Nick Strobel --
Period-Luminosity Relation for Variable Stars
All along the greensward wanders,
outlining our mile-around;
a frame upon the white road reaching
even so far as OXFORD XIX
where things are so unlike. Why,
it is a different world there.
It is different here for such as we
struggling from our hamlet's mire-dark ways
to stand upon the alien, the local absolute.
Who lurks near? What star here
shines so starkly on the white dust?
Is this road forever?
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