#hell's heart

Books I Loved in 2026: Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall

I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Publish date March 10th, 2026.

I've been a longtime fan of Alexis Hall's, and I was interested to see what he'd do in his science fiction debut. In Hell's Heart, aimless and self-destructive I- signs on a space whaling voyage in order to flee her merciless medical creditors, who own her body and soul. In this retelling of Moby Dick, she begins to realize that their charismatically deranged captain is hell-bent at hunting down the leviathan who injured her--even at the cost of her life and the lives of the entire crew.

Well! As someone who's familiar with Herman Melville's Moby Dick, I should not have been surprised that the lesbians in space retelling had a pace as slow as molasses, interspersed with endless and aimless asides to the reader. Because I- states directly how the book ends from very early on, the four hundred plus pages of boat antics and Leviathan slayings feel like mere filler before the ultimate end. The effect is exacerbated by narrator I-, who is passive, depressed, and has a very detached perspective that makes the narration feel distant. I know many of you like your women soggy and pathetic, but personally I prefer the aggressively digging themselves deeper into a hole type rather than the facedown on the floor type.

By far the strongest point of the novel was the worldbuilding. Since the original novel was set midway through the process of driving whales nearly to extinction in the Atlantic, it's fitting that the retelling is also set in a capitalistic hellscape, albeit one set in a retro-style Solar System limited space future. While I- has mostly left the awful religion she was brought in (a grotesquerie of a certain type of prosperity Christianity), she accepts the values her culture presents her without much question, and drops the awful little details as casual little asides. Onboard the ship, shower minutes are billed and taken directly out of their wages. I's surgery (implied to be gender-affirming) puts her in debt to a pharma-corp conglomerate, and if she misses a payment, they can repossess her organs. People can be sold into debt-slavery for the crime of inheriting a patented gene complex. And so on and so forth. It's a fitting accompaniment to the grim plot.

Overall, Hell's Heart is a throwback to Hall's complex early steampunk novels rather than his frivolous recent historicals. It certainly isn't a romance novel--while I- has unhappy escapist sex with a number of women, there's no romance and nothing I'd consider a full sex scene. However, I did enjoy I-'s crewmate and sometimes-lover Q-. Q- is from Earth, speaks nearly exclusively in untranslated Latin in the text, and has a sort of smartphone reference device that I- doesn't understand and refers to as her "idol". Alas, Q- is almost entirely opaque to I-, who doesn't really understand her, and therefore to the reader as well.

Summary - Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall is a sci-fi rendition of Moby Dick set in the space around Jupiter. The book's narrator goes simply by I, and she tells the tale of how she once joined a ship that intended to hunt the legendary Mobius Beast. Surrounded by several interesting, mainly nameless, characters including the captain of the ship, A, and I's friend/lover from Earth, Q.

Before I get to my actual review, I just want to mention that I've never read the original Moby Dick, but I've been told that this book captures the spirit of the original.

Thoughts - So, the tagline of this book is 'Sapphic Moby Dick in Space' which caught my attention, because of course it did, that's the whole point of a tagline. I was not prepared for how immensely depressing this book is.

The main character, I, from the very beginning, tells you everyone on her ship dies. It doesn't shy away from that fact and tries to remind you of it every third chapter or so. In saying that, it's not why I find it so depressing.

Hell's heart takes place in the far future, pretty much everyone has left Earth and taken to the stars. Capitalism has also advanced so far that it has gone uber dystopia to the point where no one really sees anything wrong with it. One of the three main 'religions' in the book is a perversion of Catholicism that measures faith in how much money you can pay the church.

And, like I said, no one sees anything wrong with it. They feel conflicted about their faiths, but not in a way where they see a big issue with the faith itself, if that makes sense.

Now, despite all the depressing stuff, I think this is a remarkably well-written book.

All the stuff I mentioned is intentional. It's meant to be this insane dystopia that is disturbing to modern readers (in the way that it's a snapshot of modern happenings dialed to 11). It does its job and it does it well.

As you read through the pages, you watch as the MC constantly decides to be the most self-destructive person she can possibly be. Most of which are tied to her libido and the fact that she's attracted to people who could ruin her, and I mean that in every conceivable meaning of the word.

Character-wise, it's pretty neat. There are few proper names in the book, focusing more on titles (for characters the MC can't remember properly) and initials (for characters whose names are too important to share). Each one is living their own lives and by that I mean, they feel like their own people separate from the MC.

Setting-wise, it is incredibly well thought-out. There is an insane amount of detail put into the world and the way it works. From the religions to the science to the monsters, all of it feels like a real account of a real place.

Plot-wise, dipping back into the depressing side of things, you can feel the impending doom growing with every chapter that passes. There is a sword hanging above their heads that only you can see and every chapter, every plot point just drops it another inch. It is both definitions of awful; both bad and full of awe.

One last thing to note is that there is so much sex in this book. No super detailed sex scenes, but at least half-detailed ones, and they seem to pop up every other chapter. They think about, like, three things in this book: Monsters, Money, and Sex. All in equal measure.

And for anyone expecting a saucy book of sexy times (and you just didn't comprehend the rest of my review), a lot of those sex scenes directly tie into the MC's lack of self-preservation and deep desire to be self-destructive. You have been warned.

Overall - This is an incredible book, super well written and well thought-out. In saying that, it is at times one of the most upsetting things I've ever read. To the point where I had to read a Cozy Fantasy novel at the same time as this to sort of balance things out.

If you've got a taste for toxic/doomed yuri, then this is absolutely the book for you. Also for fans of Moby Dick and dystopian Sci-Fi novels.

So, I've only done like 5 of these reviews so far, but this book is kinda forcing me to do something different from what I normally do. In that, I have to divide the score into "Personal" and "Objective". Because, once again, this is an amazing book, but it's also so not my preference.

Release date: 12 March 2026

Genre: adult science fiction

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

If you are looking for:

Hunting space whales in Jupiter's orbit

Satire of religion and late stage capitalism

Inevitable tragedy

Lots of casual sex and sex jokes (but ironically no dick jokes?)

I know every SFF book with lesbians gets comped with Gideon the Ninth, but this book really does give me GtN vibes I prommy

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 precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, 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 word 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 otherwise lost.

But the moment I see a sci-fi Terran with glowing skin speak Latin as her main language, and the third phrase out of her mouth is "pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo", the author has bought me hook, line and sinker. I'm like 13 pages in, and I love this already.