Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall

TL;DR: This was not for me.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much!

Plot: A rewriting more than retelling of Moby-Dick but extra horny in space with lesbians.
Characters: The juxtaposition of the Moby-Dick rewriting and these characters was weird and they ended up feeling flat. Setting: This part at least was cool. I liked this idea and the space.
Science Fiction: I really wish we’d just had a true retelling and the structure and style had been original to Alexis Hall because the SF on this was very fun.

Summary:

Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which are all that remains of what we once called society. Having long exhausted any conventional sources of energy, life in the solar system is now sustained by a volatile, hallucinogenic substance called spermaceti, which is harvested from the brains of vast cetacean-like Leviathans that swim the atmospheric currents of Jupiter.

Finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside, the narrator (“I”) takes a commission aboard the hunter-barque Pequod as it sets out in pursuit of precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barque’s captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman who the narrator names only as “A”. As the Pequod plunges ever deeper into the turbulent, monster-haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie word of Leviathan-hunting and the captain’s increasingly insistent delusions; the only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light and who remembers things otherwise lost.

Thoughts:

I had to give myself space from this so I wouldn’t rant. So here is what I’ve decided. This had all the potential to be excellent. Lesbian Space Whale hunters with Moby-Dick inspiration sounds amazing. Unfortunately instead ‘inspiration’ I think we tried WAY too hard to make this read similar in a lot of ways to Moby-Dick and that just did not work.

Could it be because I enjoy the original I found it jarring to follow a similar structured story with the opposite of everything? Probably. Do I think it worked? I really don’t. The book tries to mimic Melville’s style a little too hard. If we’d had Alexis Hall’s style with this story I think it would have been stellar. Melville’s style, not so much.

The characters came across as flat caricatures, and when you make them horny it made it feel… weird? I also can’t say I love the treatment of these characters? They used the ideas and base setup of the originals but then were wildly different and that felt very strange to read.

What was good was the ideas. The weird science fiction of it all. THAT was excellent. I liked the creatures, the space ‘sea’, and how things worked. But with everything else it didn’t get a chance to shine.

This was a big miss. Big, big miss. I sadly can’t recommend it but mileage may vary. Others have enjoyed it so… do with that what you will.