April 10, 2026

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Alexis Hall talks space whales, AI and reinventing a classic

Alexis Hall reimagines Melville’s classic with space whales, AI intrigue and a bold queer twist that launches Moby-Dick into an entirely new sci‑fi universe

By Brianne Kane, Fonda Mwangi, Alex Sugiura & Kendra Pierre-Louis

Tor Books/Scientific American Illustrations

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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

Most of us know the story of Moby-Dick, the 1851 novel by Herman Melville that dots many a high school required-reading list. That book, told from the perspective of Ishmael, a sailor aboard the whaling ship the Pequod, takes us on a journey of obsession. The ship’s captain, Ahab, has a compulsive desire that goes beyond the point of self-preservation to find and kill Moby-Dick, the giant sperm whale who bit off his leg. Let’s just say it doesn’t end well.

Hell’s Heart, by author Alexis Hall, takes that famous story and reenvisions it as a queer sci-fi space opera. Ishmael is now a trans woman who joins the crew of the spacecraft the Pequod. It’s a story that is equal parts funny, saucy and philosophical.

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SciAm associate books editor Bri Kane talked with Alexis. Here’s their conversation.

Bri Kane: I just am so eager to talk to you about how you took this incredible, like, pillar of the English literary canon from Melville, everyone’s favorite book they read in high school, obviously, and you somehow made it into a queer sci-fi, alien-hunting adventure story. [Laughs.] So I just wanted to start with, like, why did you do that? How did you do that? Why did you even want to take on such an important literary work and adapt it in this way?

Alexis Hall: So you might recall in 2020, there was, you know, this little thing called COVID. And the first lockdown happened, and I was like, “Okay, we’re locked down. I should do something to try and make the time go faster. I know—I’ll read a famously long book, one chapter a day. That way, when the lockdown ends and I haven’t finished the famously long book yet, it will feel like it went faster.”

Spoiler: that did not work. But I spent quite a large chunk of lockdown reading a chapter of Moby-Dick every day and then tweeting about the silly bits ’cause obviously things have value in context, but, you know, I think Melville is big enough to take it, and I think the fact that he’s constantly going on about flukes is funny. And because I’m a professional novelist, I inevitably went to “What would I do with this?” And I went to “You could be doing space whales on Jupiter, obviously!”

I think part of the other reason for picking science fiction specifically is there is a certain perspective from which Moby-Dick is a science-fiction book. In a totally not real sense, it’s a science-fiction book about whaling. Like, the level of detail you have about how whaling works—first of all, quite a lot of it’s made up, but also, like, the modern genre you can still do that in is science fiction. There is no other genre where you can have just a whole chapter about how they process a whale’s penis, which is a real thing that is in Moby-Dick, or a whole chapter about how they weave a particular kind of mat, which, again, is a real thing in Moby-Dick.

And I wanted to capture that energy because I always like focusing on the bits of things that perhaps other people don’t focus on as much. I think most people look at Moby-Dick, and they’re like, “It’s a story about a boat that gets destroyed by a whale”—spoiler for a 175-year-old book. Whereas I just look at it and go, “It’s a book that’s got a lot of really random detail in it and has whole long sections about, like, made-up whale biology.” [Laughs.]

Kane: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s something that we talk about at Scientific American often, are these fiction books that are interested in science, that are using science or have a character who is using science in the work, and what do we call them? Because they’re not quite science fiction, but they are fiction that has kind of a hand out towards the sciences.

And that was something that I was really interested in in your process in writing this book because how much time did you actually spend concerned with real Jupiter, like, real science and real physics here? And then when did you decide to, just to quote yourself here, make a mo