Top 10 books about space travel | Samantha Cristoforetti

The Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti chooses her favourite extraterrestrial reading, taking in fiction by Italo Calvino and Stanisaw Lem alongside reportage and history

One of the funny little things I noticed after having lived in space for a while is that, contrary to everyday experience on Earth, it took some effort to keep my arms pressed against my body. Had I remembered better my childhood reading, I wouldn't have been surprised. Jules Verne imagined this back in 1865. At one point, the protagonists of his From the Earth to the Moon realise that their bodies were absolutely without weight. Their arms, full extended, no longer sought their sides."

That wasn't the first time literature imagined a trip to the moon: in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), the knight Astolfo flies to the moon in search of Orlando's lost wits. Cyrano de Bergerac's satirical novel The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon dates back to the 17th century, and in 1857 Italian astronomer Ernest Capocci wrote a novel about the first journey to the moon, which he imagined undertaken in 2057 by a woman named Urania. Yet Verne was the first to narrate the endeavour with some measure of engineering credibility, eventually coming to be recognised as one of the fathers of science fiction.