Hell's Heart — Alexis Hall

Hell's Heart is a queer speculative fiction retelling of Melville's classic story.

Here, a small party go hunting for a giant space creature �" and experience grand adventure, love and loss along the way.

Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars. This under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches. These 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 �" this 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 these Leviathans. However, once aboard, 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 world 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 others have lost.