Hell's Heart

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

Here, a small party goes hunting for a giant space creature and experiences love and loss along the way.

Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars. This occurs 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 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.

A grand adventure is about to begin—one that will be strange, extraordinary, and utterly unforgettable.