recognito

I admit as someone who has now experienced many and various Moby Dick riffs over my time on this Earth I did not have hugely high expectations for Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart, pitched proudly on its front cover as SAPPHIC MOBY DICK IN SPACE!, but in fact it made me laugh out loud at least three times in the first couple dozen pages:

1. opening verbatim with the Nathaniel Hawthorne dedication
2. followed by an 'etymology & extracts' that includes among other things a quote from Jupiter Ascending
3. Queequeg ("Q") comes from a low-tech but socially Utopian post-collapse Earth whose "idol" (identified as such by "I") is a little Hitchhiker's Guide-esque translation pad and who speaks politely baffled Latin
3.5. Narrator looks at the audience and says, I have to explain some social context to you in case this book becomes inexplicably popular 30 years after I die and you don't know what I'm talking about --

The social context, for the record, is that we're in a dystopian capitalist deep-space future dominated by three major churches: the Church of Life, the Church of Liberty, and the Church of Prosperity, and you can imagine what these things look like. (The church that believes that the entire universe will someday be devoured by a big space leopard squid but the faithful will be devoured last is a fringe movement, but one with some bearing on the plot.) The domes under which most of humanity survives are powered by 'spermaceti' from space Leviathans that swim around the moons of Jupiter, hence the thriving deep-space whaling industry. Our protagonist, "I," is a depressed former schoolteacher in the Church of Prosperity wrestling with a loss of faith, pursued by corporate debt, and haunted by the memories of her voyage on the whaleship Pequod, which she recounts to us piece by piece over the course of this narrative (interspersed, of course, with philosophical musings, entertaining worldbuilding, and numerous memes.)

So, Hell's Heart is affectionate, satirical and clever, tonally and structurally both deeply in conversation with the OG Moby Dick and with Our Present Moment, much like a really dedicated Yuletide fic, and I had a good time reading it! Also much like a really dedicated Yuletide fic, it features a lot of sex in various combinations. 400K, Ishmael/Queequeg, Ishmael/Ahab, Ishmael/Starbuck, past!Starbuck/Ahab, Ishmael/OCs, etc. (All women, except for Starbuck who's nonbinary.) I understand the impulse but TBH I think the Moby Dick dating sim element of it all does the book a bit of a disservice -- or, maybe not the book itself, but the characters. "I" herself is an interesting if slightly differently flavored mess from original Ishmael but the more "I" has to remind me verbatim that "A" is devastatingly hot and compelling every time she enters a scene the less I believe her ... put that energy into showing, not telling! I'm effortlessly enthralled by Original Ahab! You don't need to yassify her! Also I understand why, in writing a contemporary first-person novel, one does sort of feel the need to put "I" in every scene so we understand why she knows what's happening but I am sorry to see the Ahab & Starbuck tension, which is dear to me, lose some of its force and power because a.) a generic "exes" is so much less interesting than "two longtime coworkers from the same small specific religious community who turned out Like This and Like That respectively" and b.) the book is much more interested in Ishmael's dynamic with each of them than their dynamic with each other.

On the other a.) and b.), a.) adaptations make choices and see characters in different ways and that is fine and part of the process even if I'm grumbling that this is not my Starbuck and b.) really really funny to have the scene where Starbuck almost shoots Ahab play out almost exactly as in the book except Ishmael is also just there in Ahab's bed hanging out.