#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.

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.

One of my most anticipated books of 2026 is Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall and we just got the (US) cover reveal!

Gideon the Ninth meets Murderbot in USA Today bestselling author Alexis Hall's thrilling SF debut, Hell's Heart! They are monsters, legends, gods. They are our prey. Earth is dead. Which leaves us stuck living in atmospheric domes on planets that will kill us if we blink wrong, or run out of fuel. And by “fuel” I mean “the cerebrospinal fluid of gargantuan, quasi-psychic space monsters”. I joined the hunt hoping to get paid and maybe laid, but mostly paid. Instead, I followed a captain chasing abominations in the skies of Jupiter. We battled the Möbius Beast itself, there in the red eye of the world. Spoiler: we lost.

Hell's Heart will be published on March 10, 2026 and can be pre-ordered here!

Nandor fell forward onto his hands, more blood spraying against the black ice as his back heaved with his horrid coughs. Guillermo watched him in silence. They locked eyes as Nandor took a deep breath. Biting his own lips hard enough to bleed, he suppressed a scream as he grasped the dagger and wrenched it out, more blood pouring onto the ice, pooling beneath him, marring the reflective sheen. Instantly dropping the dagger, he looked at his badly burned hand, the flesh refusing to heal.

“Fuck… Look at what you’ve done... It is agonizing...”

He held out his damaged hand to Guillermo, who looked at it impassively. It’s been agony. It’s been agony for eleven excruciating fucking years…  

In (slightly belated) honor of my friend @uv-duv​ Duv’s birthday, and also because Hells Heart as a fic series just slaps and I’ve always wanted to draw this scene from my favorite installment of the series, “The Chain”. Please read these if you like pathos and surreal mindfuckery and road trips and Nandor and Guillermo beating each other up.

Ice Texture created using the following Unsplash images: X X

Detail Images Under the Cut