Fiction Reviews
Hell’s Heart
(2026) Alexis Hall, Tor, £22 / US$29.99, hrdbk, 457pp, ISBN 978-1-035-06050-4
To borrow the language of cinema – Hell’s Heart is a remake of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: an unashamed remake of Moby Dick in space, at that.
Still a mainstay of ‘top 100 novels of all time’ lists, what the uninitiated usually know is about this doorstopper of 1851 is that it follows the one-legged Captain Ahab across the ocean in his search for the great white whale that cost him his leg. No further specific knowledge of the original is required to read this homage – although those familiar with it will probably appreciate how much has been faithfully carried across or adapted.
But to cut to chase: swap the seven seas for the skies of Jupiter, whaling boats for spaceships with harpoons (!) and the cetaceans of Earth for Jovian leviathans and you have Hell’s Heart.
If this sounds at least a little ridiculous, you’d be correct. Author Alexis Hall walks a fine line – successfully in my view – between acknowledging this comedic element and being true to the epic spirit of Ahab’s quest (By their own account Hall decided to tackle Moby Dick during the pandemic and got quite obsessed by it).
At a loose end in the Jovian moons, ‘I’ (Hell’s Heart’s equivalent of Moby Dick’s narrator Ishmael) signs on as a crewmember for the Pequod under the mysterious Captain A. The Pequod is bound for the stormy skies of Jupiter, hunting and killing the leviathans for their precious spermaceti, which can be converted into the fuel that powers the whole solar system economy. (This is a direct parallel with nineteenth century sperm whaling, where spermaceti was used in lamp oil and candles.)
Together with her newly acquired harpoon-wielding friend and lover Q – a traveller from the barbaric remnants of Earth – ‘I’ joins an odd assortment of grizzled sailors, company men, religious cultists, cyborgs and strangers from across the solar system who constitute the crew of the Pequod.
It swiftly becomes apparent that the charismatic captain has her own agenda. She hunts the mysterious Möbius Beast, the greatest of leviathans and the creature that took her leg. The first person to sight it, she promises, will receive her cut of the voyage’s profits.
Duly motivated, if somewhat sceptical as to whether the Beast is just a myth, the crew follow her into this deviation from traditional hunting practice. And what began as just another voyage in search of profit gradually becomes a strange and desperate search by an increasingly ragged crew in an ageing ship, led by a messianic figure with unshakeable self-belief and an all too evident death-wish.
While ‘I’ can see the Captain’s madness for what it is, she is drawn to A and her iron will to the point of offering herself to the captain in a masochistic relationship. Which brings us to another key element of Hell’s Heart, and one in which it most clearly departs from Moby Dick, namely there is a lot of seΧ going on.
Although as ‘I’ would point out: what else are you going to do stuck on a ship with the same people for several years at a time, particularly when the said ship is on a hunting expedition/spiritual quest in the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere? At any rate, her relationships with Q, A and the first mate form a core part of the novel and one the author (who has also written a large number of romance novels) executes with believability and aplomb.
This is an excellent first entry into SF by Alexis Hall. They may be standing on the shoulders of Herman Melville in respect of character and plot, but the fact that Hell’s Heart is gripping, funny, awe-inspiring, sensual – is an all-round superb read – is their own work and credit should be given where it is due.
It is essentially space fantasy, and of course nothing about hunting leviathans on Jupiter stands up to scrutiny, particularly the use of harpoons and hand-to-hand combat to do so. But space fantasy doesn’t equal space stupid – this is a clever novel which is (for example) quite happy to set up the comparison between its solar system’s reliance on a finite resource and our present-day situation on Earth and let the reader join the dots themselves. The religious satire is, again, exactly on the nose as it needs to be to support this.
Hell’s Heart does lose a little bit of impetus towards the end, but then again it is a book about the journey rather than the conclusion and that would be my only criticism of the best genre book I’ve read so far this year. It absolutely passes the ‘would I buy this for other people’ test.
And reading it has encouraged me to finally give Moby Dick a try. If the original inspired a book this good, then it absolutely has to be worth checking out.
Tim Atkinson
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