We wanted to do another bookish meme on Wednesday and after doing Can’t Wait Wednesday a few times we decided that would be a fun one to bring around more often! About twice a month you’ll see this meme on our blog.
Can’t Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they’re books that have yet to be released. It’s based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.
Gideon the Ninth meets Moby Dick in USA Today bestselling author Alexis Hall’s science fiction debut, Hell’s Heart!
Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which 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 called spermaceti, which is 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 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.
Sapphic Moby Dick in Space is the tag line, and it is what drew me in for sure! I didn’t really need to read much else, but I also saw this description on a 2026 most anticipated releases list on Goodreads;
Multi-genre author Alexis Hall (Boyfriend Material) goes future-tense Melville in this new book, inspired by the classic Moby Dick. In Hall’s reiteration, the whale is a space leviathan, the captain is an obsessive spaceship pilot, and our narrator is a curious Earthling named I, which works out nicely for narrating. Look for some gender flipping, a bit of queer space horror, and yet another dispiriting vision of Earth’s future.
And that is what took it over the edge haha. I just knew I had to read this one! A good retelling is always fun, make it a space setting and I’m immediately more excited. I’m also really curious to see what Alexis Hall does with a scifi story. This book will be released in March and I can’t wait to dive into this story!
