Books book reviews Disaster Bisexuals and Space Whales: Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall This SF take on Moby-Dick has captured something fundamental about the fragility and interconnectedness of human life. By Jenny Hamilton | Published on April 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Will you take it as a brag if I tell you that I have read Moby-Dick twice? I read it in college in two successive years because the “American Literature to 1850” professor and the “American Literature since 1850” professor both felt entitled to claim it. 1 There is way too much whaling talk in it, to my recollection—sometimes a classic just actually has some major structural flaws, like Huckleberry Finn—but if you are comfortable skipping around, it’s a pretty good read. Funny, dark, a slow-moving tragedy. Hell’s Heart is one of two queer Moby-Dick retellings that have come out lately, and its author, Alexis Hall, author of a fascinating assortment of books, including one of my top five romance novels of all time (give it up for Pansies), has not paused to wonder if restraint might be in order. 2 Hell’s Heart goes balls-to-the-wall from page one, following disaster bisexual I as she falls in with a hot Terran harpooner named Q and signs on for a three-year space voyage to hunt space whales. I has more debts than instincts for self-preservation, and she’s horribly allured by the doomed and dire ship’s captain, A. With the gravitas and credentials of a person who has read Moby-Dick two (2) times and didn’t even get a good grade as recompense one of those times, 3 I feel qualified to say that Hell’s Heart is a worthy successor to its original. It’s sprawling and funny and strange. It takes long existential detours in between episodes of whale-fighting and crewmate-fucking. That second part, I admit, did not feature in the original text, but we assume it would have, had Herman Melville not been writing in the still-Puritan fetters of 1851. 4 In line with a lot of SF these days, the world of Hell’s Heart is deeply rooted in financial precarity and corporate greed. The protagonist ships out with the Pequod in part because she owes money to the Aphrodite Pharma State, having taken out loans to cover surgical changes to her body. From what we can tell, most or all of her shipmates are in similar financial straits. I is also an apostate member of a Christian-ish church by way of the Ferengi from Star Trek, and there’s an amusing (but dark) through-line of I sharing her church’s profit-focused interpretations of familiar biblical passages. As the three-year journey continues, and A sinks deeper into her obsession with killing the Möbius Beast, at the expense of the ship’s profit margins and therefore the crew’s earnings, conflicts over money and religion and destiny threaten to destabilize the whole ship. If Hell’s Heart has a flaw, it’s that Hall leans too heavily on cutie-pie fourth-wall breaking. An occasional wink to the audience—a reference to that one tweet about leopards eating faces; Q’s Latin dialogue consisting mostly of quotes from Catullus or Cicero or the Vulgate Bible; a really delightful joke about Elmo—would have been fine, but it really has to be a garnish, not the whole dish. There were just too many sperm jokes! I would have even been fine with actual sperm jokes, which I could relay to my mother over coffee and she could tell me she regrets giving birth to me, but these were mainly just the author reminding us, at regular intervals, that it’s amusing for sperm whales to be called that. Buy the Book Hell’s Heart Alexis Hall Buy Book Hell’s Heart Alexis Hall Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Aside from that, I’d like to make the case that Hell’s Heart is a pandemic novel and should become the pandemic novel of record in our genre. Please do not walk away yet! I agree with you, in the main. I too do not want to read books about the pandemic. I am no longer even willing to read books about a pandemic. It’s been six years since COVID started, and very few authors have bothered to try writing the big pandemic novel, or even acknowledge in their work that we experienced a massive paradigm shift circa 2020/2021 and it sent a lot of people off the deep end in ways that the world may not ever recover from. (We did all get to learn a bunch of sea shanties, though. That was cool.) When I say, then, that Hell’s Heart is a COVID novel, I mean something maybe a little different. In the acknowledgments, Alexis Hall thanks the lockdown-era Moby-Dick chapter-a-day read-a-long for the opportunity to read Moby-Dick, and it was like a key had turned in the lock of the book, and everything about it suddenly made perfect sense. There is no pandemic in this book (although, as I say, there is quite a lot of capitalism), but it feels like the pandemic, anyway, and its aftermath. Hear me out. They’re trapped on the Pequod for a matter of years. They’re all so fed up with each other, and also extremely horny. If A causes them to miss an opportunity to meet up with another ship and bone everyone on board that other ship, mutiny becomes a real risk. Nothing about anyone’s religion makes sense, but a worrying number of religious people seem to want a lot of other folks dead. Instead of taking any living person’s advice, the captain has a troubling codependent relationship with an AI that seems to be encouraging her worst impulses, but also using up computer processing power that the crew would greatly prefer was devoted to streaming porn. One guy falls into an open Leviathan carcass, goes insane from all the guts, and starts a death cult, which is much cooler than the parallel incident in the source text (rip to Pip but Marsh is different). 5 Do you see what I mean? Do you feel the pandemic vibes? Do you remember when we all, for some reason, watched Tiger King? Do you remember the brief hope that we might experience a sea change in air filtration standards, but instead we got like four new food delivery apps to create the illusion of freedom for the prolecariat? 6 Do you remember how disconnected from reality you felt when Christian megachurches started insisting it was a deeply held religious tradition for them to abjure face masks and take ivermectin enemas for Communion or whatever? In Hell’s Heart, Hall has captured something fundamental about the fragility and interconnectedness of human life. Our current moment feels like a long, slow, idiotic slide into preventable disaster, as we all scramble to pay bills and the decision-makers let us fall into ruin in furtherance of their own stupid little agendas. For all of I’s jokes, for all of her cynicism and dysfunction, she is recounting the story of a tragedy, a monumental, pointless loss of life. It’s dark, and funny, and terribly human. I had, if you’ll forgive me, a whale of a time.[end-mark] Hell’s Heart is published by Tor Books. The professor of the From 1850 course gave me a two-one instead of the first I deserved, so I’m loath to admit Moby-Dick should have belonged to him and not the To 1850 professor. But it’s true. My intellectual honesty is but one of the reasons I should have gotten a first in that class. It’s fine. It was a while ago. I’m not still mad about it. ︎It is not! No gods no masters! ︎I DESERVED AN A. I ALWAYS GET AN A. I AM AN A STUDENT. THEY SET THE CURVE BY ME. THAT IS THE WAY OF THINGS. ︎1851, a year that is famously after 1850. I should only have had to read this book once. My grievances are many. ︎If you were not cruelly forced to unfairly read Moby-Dick twice (it was good, it was fine, just maybe not twice), you may not recognize this as a Moby-Dick joke but it was one. Award me a first immediately. ︎ I’ve just come up with this word. Does this work? I know we have precariat, but I wanted to be innovative. I never use the actual word “proletariat” because I find it funny to say profiterole instead. Maybe this is why I didn’t get a first. Maybe it was because I am Like This. That’s fair. ︎The post Disaster Bisexuals and Space Whales: <i>Hell’s Heart</i> by Alexis Hall appeared first on Reactor.