Hell’s Heart, by Alexis Hall, is not going to be a book for everyone, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. A space-opera retelling of Moby-Dick chock full of references to other works? Check. Asides about the literary structure of the narrative? Check. Planetary romance? Check. Disaster lesbians/pansexuals with more than a splash of BDSM? Check. Creepy cults? Check. Anticorporate/anticapitalistic dystopia? Check. Long philosophical/pseudoscientific digressions? Check. Exciting action? Check. DRAMA? Check!
The title, of course, is taken from the crisis near the end of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Captain Ahab exclaims “…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” (Interestingly, however, the dedication of Hell’s Heart is not to Melville, but to Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
In some ways, Hell’s Heart follows the plot of Moby-Dick fairly closely: The narrator-protagonist, I, signs up for a three-year tour on a hunting-barque as a novice alongside a chance-met but instantly close acquaintance, the experienced harpooner Q; we know from the beginning that Captain A’s quest after the great Leviathan, the Möbius Beast, is doomed to end in shipwreck and many deaths; many other plot details are repeated, or at least rhymed; even the names of the other hunting ships that the Pequod encounters are often, if not always, the same.
Of course, there are huge differences. The most obvious, of course, is that instead of hunting whales on Earth’s oceans, the crew here is hunting various other vast critters among the gas clouds of Jupiter. I’d call Hell’s Heart a planetary romance, since it’s structured as “I” writing a memoir in the form of an adventure story about hunting that’s targeted at voyeurs from other planets who’ll never visit there, and since it doesn’t bother to explain such details as how human beings can chow down on creatures from other planets. All the same, I really admire the worldbuilding throughout this book, including socioeconomic details and explanations of how the “spermaceti” or psychoactive, electromagnetic-conductive, cerebrospinal fluid of the leviathans is harvested to power the wide-flung human economy.
Contemporary reviewers of Moby-Dick called it a romance, with the older meaning of an adventure story, among many other critical and laudatory descriptions. An author’s note on Hall’s website says “Hell’s Heart is not a romance,” but I believe that Hall means that to distance it from their best-selling modern and fantastic romance novels, as this is apparently their first science fiction book.
That’s not to say that there’s no romance here, or at least sex. There’s lots and lots of explicit sex in Hell’s Heart, far beyond what one contemporary reviewer of Moby-Dick referred to as the “sensual friendship” between Ishmael and Queequeg. “I” throws herself into lesbian sex with Q and BDSM relationships with her superiors, along with various other crewmates, for reasons ranging from attraction to boredom to self-sabotage.
Self-sabotage is a central driver of the journey of “I.” She’s had extensive enough body modifications (unspecified, although I think sex change is a possibility) that she no longer owns it, and so feels disconnected from it and from life. Escaping repayments and repossession is part of what sends her on a three-year hunting cruise, aside from her basic restlessness and occasional thoughts of suicide. So naturally when she sets eyes on the striking, doomed captain A, she becomes fairly fixated on her.
“I” says her own name doesn’t matter, and says she’s refraining from using the real names of Q and A out of respect, although she names everyone else in the crew. For Captain A, her feeling almost approaches idolatry; she’s been dancing around a quest for death, and the Möbius-obsessed A seems like Death Incarnate.
There is a whole lot about religion in this book, but it’s religion that has evolved and twisted for centuries after humans colonized the solar system and mainly abandoned Earth, having exploited it to the maximum extent. The Big Three Churches are that of Life, of Liberty, and of Prosperity; having been raised in the Church of Prosperity, “I” sees everything and everyone as property of one sort of another, and that if one is unhappy, one must deserve it. Some of the logic-chains that she follows due to this worldview, and that many others such as the first mate obviously follow (as encoded in corporate policies and law), can be truly chilling.
But the Church of Starry Wisdom, a cult that gains prominence among the crew, holds that doom is coming for everyone, and the only agency one can have is to choose the manner of one’s death. Thus they have their own reasons for following the captain’s quest. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in the crew knows they are at terrific risk, the captain keeps almost all of them loyal to her mission.
I mentioned literary structure and references to other works. “I” frequently digresses about why she’s writing this book the way it is, referring to discarded previous drafts that took other tacks, and speculates about how the reader may be taking her story, ultimately dismissing such concerns (except that making money from it would be nice). This is kind of fun, but I also really adore the little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the text. Since much of Earth history and literature has been lost or censored, it’s not always apparent that “I” knows what she’s doing when she quotes, for example, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but we readers can certainly appreciate it! (And Christian scripture gets hideously misinterpreted by some characters, but that’s sadly nothing new.) Moreover, I love Hall’s use of language throughout, in lyrical descriptions, in philosophical digressions, in allusions, and in punchy or earthy directness when appropriate.
Since Earth has been basically sucked dry of resources, and everyone who’s left just shares the leftovers, most people on the outer planets consider that it’s fallen back into barbarism. “Q” is from Earth, and she often mutters to herself in her “barbarous” language that nobody understands. Hall represents this as Latin. That’s hilarious to me, since I remember enough Latin from high school to get the gist of what Q says most of the time, without having to resort to an online translator, and to see that perceived as barbarism by most of the crew is just so ironic. But fear not, Q often repeats herself (less eloquently) in Exodite, the common tongue of the human exodus, which Hall renders in English, or others repeat the sense of what Q said, so the reader will not be left at sea.
It did take me just a little work at the beginning of the book to get into it. If you hated Moby-Dick for its pacing, or lack thereof, and for all its digressions, you’ll almost certainly hate Hell’s Heart too. If you hate disaster characters, you’ll cringe at many decisions made by “I.” But there’s much more than enough in here to keep an attentive reader thoroughly engaged and entertained. I thought it was great!
Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall will be released on March 10 in the U.S. and March 12 in the U.K.
Content warnings: Cursing, sex, BDSM practices, suicidal thoughts, religion and cults, late-stage capitalism, hunting of vast creatures whose sentience is unexamined, and gory dismemberment of same.
Comps: Moby-Dick; or, the Whale by Herman Melville; “Boojum,” “Mongoose,” and “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear; Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.
