Demyth Turns the Page with Alexis Hall

Call me Ishmail..... actually scratch that. Call our main character I as we delve into Hell's Heart with Lauren and author Alexis Hall. 

They delve into how closely the book mirrors Moby Dick. Queer reading of the original novel and how the book was adapted to make it scifi

There are the obligatory spoilers that go more into the AI choices of changing a racially stereotyped character and a change to the ending. Plus discussions about our unreliable narrator

Lauren also shares her frustrations with characters actions even if a different choice would have F'd up the plot completely

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Call me Lauren and call this podcast D Myth Turns the Page.

SPEAKER_04 0:30

My special episodes where I go running from my debts, I head off into space and find myself flying into Hell's Heart with Alexis Hall. So hi Alexis. Or should I call you I or Ishmael or We'll go with Alexis?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

I have written books where I do where I do semi like in-character interviews for, but um uh this is not one of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:06

Okay, cool. So we're going with Alexis then. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming to speak to me today about Hell's Heart.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Thank you so much for having me here. It's lovely to be here. I know what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_04 1:19

So I'm making the assumption here that you love Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I am I uh it's really hard to like answer that question without using the phrase massive dickhead, isn't it? Like um, but yeah, so yeah, uh yeah, a massive dickhead. I'm I by very very very much a big fan, yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

So as a precursor for this, I have not read it, but I have done my Wikipedia research. So I think that has given me, and we'll probably get into it as we go through, a slightly different reading experience to someone who is maybe more familiar with the story.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

That's very possible. So um sorry, I sorry, I don't know how much information you want me to volunteer spontaneously. And um uh so I that I because this was a dual US UK publication, I actually had two editors, one of whom was a massive dickhead. Sorry, it's it's not actually what Moby Dick fans are called, but it just it strikes me as funny.

SPEAKER_04 2:08

Um no look no we can go with that.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Um and um and one of whom had never read Moby Dick, so you did get this kind of slightly odd thing where one person was like, Yes, I completely understand what this is about, and one person was like, What is going on here?

SPEAKER_04 2:21

So, as someone who loves it, what about it made you think, yeah, that's gonna make an epic sapphic sci-fi story?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Okay, I mean so so um I I do tell this this is a story a lot, so but this isn't particularly exclusive content. But um, so I first got Moby Dick during lockdown, and my original plan was like, oh, we're gonna be like at home for a while. I know I'll read a chapter a day of Moby Dick, that'll make it go much faster. It did not make it go much faster. Uh it turns out Moby Dick is long, but lockdown was longer. Um but I just got there, but I read through a chapter a day, I tweeted about it back when you could be on Twitter. Um and I just got really obsessed with it. Um and then a couple of years and and and because um because I'm a professional novelist, um, I did have this kind of kicking around in my head, how will you do an adaptation of this? And I briefly said, well, you could you could do fantasy, but it's dragons, and then I was like, or you could do it in space. And I think the part of the reason I went sci-fi with it in the end is that like from a certain perspective, Moby Dick is a sci-fi novel about whaling. Like, there's a lot a lot of the stuff that's in Moby Dick is the kind of extraordinarily detailed minutiae that you only get now in science fiction. Like, there's no other genre where you can spend like kind of whole chapters just talking about the technical details of how the boats work. There's a one of the things I find fascinating actually is that like a lot of a lot of people, if they when they do read Moby Dick, kind of they'll they'll read all the bits that are weird about Moby Dick and be like, kind of, well, just what novels were like in the 19th century, and the answer is no. Novels were not like that in the 19th century. Even in the 19th century, you get a lot of people being like, kind of, this is weird. What the fuck is going on? Why is so much of this allegorical? Why are there long chapters where they just talk about how spears work? So I had the the do-it science fiction idea in my head, and then I kind of shelled that for a while because I have a very full schedule and I have a lot of stuff. And I but then my agent was doing the rounds, agents do things where they go and they talk to editors and they're like, kind of, what are you looking for? Um and my editor was talking sorry, my agent was talking to the editor and said, you know, what's your like dream project? And they said uh Moby Dick is a romance. And my agent was like, Hold my beer. And so and so then I pitched Saffic Moby Dick in space, and this is uh how we went up.

SPEAKER_04 5:06

It is a very typical kind of fantasy sci-fi story where you have a quest, and it's classic for a reason. People love that kind of questing story.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

No, exactly, and um there's one of the things that's complex about Moby Dick is that there's there's a um there's a a self-published novel, and I I sometimes feel the need to like frame caveat by the saying, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, but which I think some people sometimes do, um, called Moby Dick the Good Parts, where someone very early on in the days of self-publishing, I think, just uh took Moby Dick and edited out all of the the random bits where it's just details about whaling, and then you've got a really tight, well-plotted adventure story, and there's definitely that in there, but of course, it's also this very weird allegorical novel about like the soul of America.

SPEAKER_04 5:58

So, as I said, obviously I've not read it. So, how close have you tried to go with this compared to Herman Melville's original structure? And I was reading on Wikipedia and he talks about the chapter sequence. The there's a critic who wrote some stuff which I found on Wikipedia that talks about chapter sequences and chapter clusters and balancing chapters, and the idea of there being three chapters on whale painting. And so you do have some chapters where it's a lot more about this is this is about the whale, and you have some technical stuff, but you have stuff that's also plot. So is that why you've chosen to do it like that to kind of try and keep it similar to pr pretty much.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

So it's like um part so I I have a real problem with overcommitting to the bit. Um, and one of the things I wanted to do because very often when people do Moby Dick retellings, they'll do kind of you'll keep the core of Captain with one leg, whale, spoiler, ship sinks at the end. But I kind of did want it to be a lot closer to to sort of doing some of the other things that Moby Dick was doing, and so rather than just retelling the the core structure of the story to keep quite a lot of to almost to a fault, keep quite a lot of structure. So for example, um so as if if you've not read the book, um I don't want to say that everything that is weird about Hell's Heart is like that because that's how it is in Moby Dick, but a lot of it is like that because that's how it is in Moby Dick. Like there's just a chapter where she stops and lists different kinds of Leviathan, that's from Moby Dick. There's a chapter which is just talking about whale penis, that's from Moby Dick. Um there's a there's a guy called Bulkington who appears in one chapter and they say he's gonna be really important and then he's never written it again, that's from Moby Dick. Um all of the obviously there's a whole thing throughout the book where um where the Pequod has these meetings called Gams with other ships, and all of those are directly from the book, they're directly from the book in sequence. Um it's not a complete like beat by beat retelling. There are variations. Uh there's more pirates in my version. Um because pirates are fun. But um I did part of my goal was to keep a lot more of what is weird about Moby Dick as well as what is a cool adventure story about Moby Dick, because I like weird stuff.

SPEAKER_04 8:44

And it lends itself so well to sci-fi. I want to get into this specifically over a few specific plot points, but what were your biggest challenges with writing this? Because obviously it is quite loyal to the original story, but a lot of fairy tale retellings they play a lot looser with characters and story beats. Like you might have a character who looks like Snow White and she might eat an apple, but the rest of the story is essentially so different, whereas this is so similar. So was that a real challenge?

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Kind of.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Um I mean there's a certain um oh god, I don't want to use the word Ulipian. Umlipo.

SPEAKER_04 9:29

I I've never even heard that word before.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Oh god, they were like the opposite of the Dadaists. They were like um they were the people who um that whole thing was like you impose really deliberate, like arbitrary challenges on yourself and work within them. So like um one of the most famous works was something called um uh uh a hundred thousand million sonnets, where it's like it's 14 lines of a sonnet, but there's like 10 of them, and you can put them in and you can and you can like take each group of 10 and put them in any order and it makes sense. Um, or like they would do things like you write stories that are palindromic or that don't use the letter E, and the idea is that it's about deliberately imposing constrictions on yourself to sort of give yourself a challenge, and it sort of does to some extent kind of promote creativity. Um, because also the the flip side of that is it did but it did make structuring the book a lot easier because you're like, how am I gonna structure this? I'm gonna I'm just gonna use the the existing structure of Moby Dick, Melville did it for me 175 years ago. Um in terms of like the in some ways one of the biggest challenges actually was um because I'm Moby Dick is like one of one of the books that is held up as the great American novel. Um and uh if you're familiar with the rest of my work, I don't have to do this to work. I am I'm a very British writer, like I insist on British spelling, I insist on not having American editors randomly change bits of British dialect to American dialect. Um I always have British voice actors um for the for the for the audio, but obviously for this one it needed to be an Americanized book. And um uh one of the things I found really difficult for all because obviously it's it's also quite a horny book. And um there not being a good American equivalent of the word wank is actually quite hard. Is there not? Well, like so you've got jerk off, but that's very masculine coded. It is, uh, and you've got masturbate, but that sounds very formal.

SPEAKER_04 11:38

I don't like that.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Yeah, so um and uh uh and there's loads of words where you can go I I would say wank here, but like but that's not an American word. Um so in some ways Americanizing was the biggest challenge. Um obviously there's a ton of other more complex, more technical stuff to do with like trying to engage with something as because obviously obviously like in some ways it's ironically, I suppose for a book that is in some ways about hubris, in some ways trying to tackle Moby Dick, particularly as someone who's not even American, is a bit of a hubristic exercise. Um, and going in with the I'm not just gonna do a story about a whale, I'm gonna try and do just literally what Melville did, but 175 years later, um was kind of an enormous undertaking, but I will say the thing that stood out to me most as a difficult thing at the time was the the lack of a good wank synonym.

SPEAKER_04 12:36

That's not the answer I was expecting.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_04 12:41

It never occurred to me that that was such a British thing.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

It's very very rubbish. Like it's one of the iconic things that like when Americans try to be British, one of the words is like wank and bloody shag. Is that I don't know if you're a Buffy the Vampire Slayer person or a black one?

SPEAKER_04 12:53

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

The scene with with Spike. Yeah, yeah, where he thinks he's girls' son. Shag, bloody bollocks.

SPEAKER_04 13:02

What was your world building process like? Because obviously in Moby Dick, it is set on Earth, so we have real locations, so we can track it and be we could get a map and be like, oh, okay, so they're here now, they're here now. But you've got planets and planets with people that we're not familiar with, and you touch on differences and some sort of stereotypes about oh, people from this place are like this, and it's quite post-apocalyptic. And this may tie into it actually, because I wanted to know what the exodus was because that is something that happens pre-book, and it's all part of the world building that makes makes them need to go and Jupiter. How do you pronounce it? Spermaceti.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

I okay, I will say so. I'm uh a phrase uh a lovely phrase I heard recently, actually, was I'm uh was never judge someone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading. So I've only ever seen the word written down, I say spermaceti, you say spermaceti. We just both say sperm seti, but that we're cool. It might be sperma chetty or it could even be spermacetti if you do like the the the Latin hard R thing. Hard R, hard C. But I don't know. I would say sperm seti personally. So in terms of the world building, so um so part of the part of what I wanted to do was to make the book feel like original Moba Dick. And obviously original Mobadick is set in the 19th century, so I needed to have a world where for some reason you were suddenly doing things in a kind of 19th century way. And I also needed to have a world where things kind of were about kind of 19th century things or had 9th century vibes, and also to have a world that was trying to do for more for the modern world for modern America, what Mobadic was doing for 19th century America. Um so the deal with the Exodus was um basically, yeah, I I I needed uh almost a plot device for why suddenly their way of getting energy is is is sperm oil again. Because like there was this one of the things that one of the things that's really odd about Mobadic, and one of the reasons I think it feels so science fiction looking back, is it's from an era where genuinely killing whales and draining their head juice was how you got fuel. And that's just a thing, that's just how the world worked, which is weird. Um and then obviously like 'cause like um so what so Mobidic is set it was published in 1851, and so it's probably set in like the late 1840s, and that really was the dying days of uh the sperm hunt. Um if you say sperm enough, you eventually you stop running it funny. Um and basically what happened was suddenly like you know, oil like like we use today became a thing. Um sort of depressing in a way that the thing that replaced killing endangered species wound up being in some ways even more of an ecological problem. Um but that kind of drove um drove the the the whale the whale hunt into decline, and so I needed a world where that wasn't the case. And fortunately, if you're doing science fiction stuff, you can make up whatever you want. Um and particularly in deep future sci-fi, like post like post-energy crisis is quite a common one. Um and obviously you could obviously renewables are a thing, but also renewables are weirdly uh ideologically out of favour at the moment, uh, in certain circles, um, you know, because they're too woke as far as I can tell. Um so it wasn't a huge jump to me to have this world where we're back to hunting fish for their brain oil.

SPEAKER_04 17:02

I think that makes the book feel really relevant at the moment that we are going back to something that to me, I don't eat meat and I care about sort of ecological problems, that we're going back to that in in your book. Whereas, yeah, there's no mention of renewable things. It's like, no, let's go and hunt and kill some whales. Leave the whales alone. Or space whales, leave the space whales alone. We learn very early on that I, who is our narrator and main character, has had body upgrades, and she is running from debt collectors, which is part of the reason that she ends up on the how did you say us pronounce Pequad?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

I would say Pequad, but again, and this one's a really complicated one, because that is one of the questions I got from editors when I was pushing the book was why I was sticking with the name of the ship. Um, and for what it's worth, all the names of the boats are the real names of the boats from Moby Dick. The character names change, the boat names are the same. Um, Pequad is actually the name of an indigenous American tribe, and arguably that's probably like probably was deliberate at the time. It wasn't just Melville picking a random name because the original book is very um about America, and for his time, Melville was actually quite aware of those kinds of issues. Um so I would say Pequad, but I will say that is actually the name of a real people, so that's got a right answer, and I don't know what it is. I generally hear it as Pequod.

SPEAKER_04 18:35

How does the kind of body upgrades work? And what in your mind, as someone, because this presumably is something that does not happen in Moby Dick because this feels very futuristic and sci-fi. What in your mind would drive I to do this rather than say that people have I'm sorry to cut it to go.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Uh so this is so the so this is something that I I think is maybe perhaps more subtle in the book than I intended. Uh she's trans. Okay. She's just specifically trans. So the opening of the book where she's like, call me whatever the fuck you want, and she ends on calling me I, and she says specifically it's the only pronoun no one's ever denied me. Um, there's a bit very early on, she talks about that she's got endocrine synthesizers, so she has implants that convert cholesterol into estrogen, so she doesn't have to take um hormones. Um, there's a bit later she talks about having had a phalangeal reduction and osseous narrowing, so she's literally had surgery to like kind of make her bones lighter and her hands smaller. So uh yeah, so what drove her to it is that she's she's fucking transgender.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

Um, I'm glad you clarified that because a lot of that medical stuff would have gone way over my head. I sort of I'm a very I don't like medical stuff, so when it's a lot of medical stuff, I'm a bit like, oh, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna Google what that is.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

I mean to be clear, a lot of it so a lot of it's so a lot of it's one of the things that was difficult about it is that obviously I um when you're doing that kind of hard science fiction is you you're kind of writing about it from the inside. So let's be clear, none of the stuff she talks about is real stuff because it's from a deep future where you can do way more gender-affirming surgery than you can do in real life. Um, so like yeah, in real life, you can't have surgery to make your bones smaller. That would be nuts. Um, but in a extreme in so one of the again, one of the the world-building things is that it's set in this very deep future where there is simultaneously a ton of hyper advanced technology, but it is incredibly expensive, it's controlled entirely by rich people. So you can technically do wonders if you can pay for them. And so, yeah, what what drove her to sell her life into medical debt? Um, gender dysphoria.

SPEAKER_04 20:44

That makes sense for some other stuff to do with her issues.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Yeah, she's got a lot of issues.

SPEAKER_04 20:51

This might be really obvious to someone who knows, but does Q speak Latin? Because there's a point, there is a point where I tell us some of Q's language that they learned, and I was like, right, that's Latin. But for so much of it, I was like, oh, I won't I had I was like, I'm gonna ask about like the language writing process and like how if you can can you understand? Could you write it all down and translate it? But if it's Latin, then obviously.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

A lot of it is direct quotations, a lot, a lot of it's specifically the Vulgate Bible. So very often when she's talking to particularly because one of the things we might get onto later is that I has a lot of issues about her religion for some reason. Um, and a lot of the time when she's talking to Q about that, what Q is saying to her is literally direct biblical quotes. Also, also sometimes during sex, she directly quotes the Song of Solomon. Um, some of it is uh oh god, the um the the Latin quote um that I think possibly caused my copy editor the most confusion is um very early on when they're in the in the inn and she's shouting. At the um uh she's shouting at um at the the innkeeper. The line she uses um uh pedicabo ego vosisumabo, which is um is a line from a poem by Catullus. This is famously uh one of the most vulgar and insulting things ever put into print. Um which I won't necessarily translate here. You can. Oh, oh uh it means I will bugger you and face fuck you.

SPEAKER_04 22:22

It's um that means that gets your point across.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Yeah, it's um it's um it's a very famous line from Catullus. It's him being really angry at I think another poet. Um, so yeah, so she she um so so the thing with Q is um because obviously so so Q is the the standing character, fourth character, Quequeg in the book. And in the original book, though there's a whole lot of discourse around like the portrayal of Quequeg. Um because you know he's from a he's from a made-up Pacific Island culture written by obviously a white American man, but a white American man who actually had quite a lot of experience to that culture because he had like travelled there. There's um his Melville's first two books were actually autobiographical. Um the second one was called the first one was called, second one was called Taipei. Um and they're about him jumping ship and just getting like stranded on a Pacific Island for a while, and people said he made it up, but some of it was corroborated, but um but one of the things about Quequeg is that he speaks in a way that codes quite racist to us these days because he speaks in this very, very pigeony way, and I wanted there to be a I wanted there to be a language gap between I and Q and I really wanted it to be clear to the reader that it was that it was essentially that I was the ignorant one in that relationship. Because one of the things that's problematic about um, you know, Western global hegemony and anglophone cultural dominance is that when you have a character who doesn't speak good English, that character it's really hard to make that character not automatically code as unsophisticated, as ignorant, as uneducated, because we have this overwhelming cultural pressure which tells us that not speaking English is a moral failing, no matter how many other languages you speak. And pretty much the only language that an Anglophone audience can look at and be like, okay, the fact I don't speak that language is my problem, not their problem, is Latin. So, yes, she speaks Latin.

SPEAKER_04 24:31

I clearly has a lot of issues, and I'm guessing some of that is around her gender dysphoria, but there could also be some other issues there.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:41

So how does it help I that she can talk to Q? And because Q's knowledge of the language that she exode, I think, is the language that I speaks. Q's language Q's knowledge of Exodite isn't fluid and things get missed, that I feel she can just talk about some of her issues.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

That's again it's a really complicated one because obviously you like um there's a whole lot of like um like implicit paradigmic stuff about like the feeling of the the the feeling that someone is safe to talk to because they don't understand you, um, especially when you put it in like you know broader context of imperialism, which obviously is again one of the things baby deck is about. Um yeah, no, I think it probably does really does really help her. I think the fact that um because obviously like a lot pretty much all of I's issues, okay. So first of all, um if you've ever engaged with any other interviews with me, I am uh I am a very I'm a huge death of the author person. I don't like interpreting my own books for people. But um, because I don't think it's my place, I think it's I think books exist for the reader. So uh so obviously a lot of I's issues come from the fact that she was raised within this very closed culture, and there's an extent to which her entire culture is inescapable because she's in this hyper late-stage capitalist society, everything is controlled by these weird entities that are some kind of mix between corporations and states. She's been raised with a very rigid doctrinaire worldview that no one's really allowed to challenge, that no one really has the language to challenge. And so by meeting someone that's just from completely outside that system, and who, as you say, like doesn't really who she can just talk at and without fear of judgment, because partly she doesn't understand it, and partly although I I think it's it becomes very clear later on that like kind of Q probably understands a fair amount and that like a big part of the reason she doesn't she mostly speaks her own language is because that's what she's more comfortable with, and she doesn't feel any particular obligation to engage with exodite society on its own terms because exodite society is bad. Um but no, I think having someone who at least feels to you like they're not part of the system that oppresses you is probably really important to her.

SPEAKER_04 27:02

This is more of a Moby Dick question than a health art question, because this is something that you have taken from Moby Dick. But I goes to church and hears the story of Jonah and the whale before then going and finding Pequod and joining the the quest. So, what is the relevance of that particular biblical story where Moby Dick is also obviously a whale?

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Yeah, so so okay, so so one of things I will say is I am I am not a Melfield scholar. Um I listened to a certain amount of Melfield scholars while writing the book because I wanted to get a sense of like what what it was doing. Um so I can't really speak to what these I mean I mean there's the obvious one, which is it's about a whale, right? And Moby Dick is also like about a whale. Uh and and I think there is a level on which it works like that. I think obviously, um, so one of the things that's one of the reasons that I have so much religious baggage is because like Moby Dick is really like about religion in a lot of ways. Like, like, you know, the whale is gold is a very common interpretation. And when I say so, I I've um one of the bits of secondary secretism I I followed along with when I was working on the book was um there was a there's a couple of the a lot of people have done like like blogs where they just read through Moby Dick, and there was um I remember reading well I can't remember which one is which one it was now. I think it might have been called the Beige Moth, but I might be completely completely different. Um uh where they got to um I can't remember what I can gatekeeper chip and it's straight in my head, but it's the one with the one with the guy who thinks he's the Archangel Gabriel, which again is is a real bit in Moby Dick. Um and what this this this blogger was saying was like kind of I knew that the whale is god was an interpretation. I never realized that there's just a chapter where someone straight up says the whale is god and people are like, nah you're crazy. Um so I think probably the story of Jonathan is doing stuff in Moby Dick that I, as not a Melville scholar, are not so qualified to go into, and it's in Hell's Heart partly because it so obviously there are a lot of things that are in Hell's Heart just because they're in Moby Dick, and some of them are just in jokes for for dickheads, um, which I'm gonna stick with. Um but a lot of them what I have tried to do is I have tried to say, okay, so this is the bit in Moby Dick, I need to make it relevant to this story, and obviously, um so partly the relevance of the Jonah story in Hell's Heart is that it frames the idea that I's whole life has been encompassed by this extremely repressive religious environment she grew up in. It's partly still the obvious whale connection, it's partly to do with highlighting the so one of the things about the religion in Hell's Heart is that like it's really clear that they've lost sight of a lot of the context. Um like there's um there's a bit where in the bit where she goes to the chapel and she gets the the story of Jonah told her, it like specifically ends with the preacher basically saying that this the book of Jonah is about how you should all be self-starting entrepreneurs. And obviously, that's not what the story of Jonah is really about. And that sort of parallel with the fact that you know Q speaks Latin and often quotes the Vulgate Bible, um it's about creating this sense of sort of continuity through history, but also the way in which societies interpret the past as reflections of themselves. So I was raised in a culture which views the Bible as only really existing to justify the preconceptions of its day, which you know, arguably is how people always view religion. Because again, like it's um sorry, I I I go off a tangents a lot, which I hope is okay. Um so what like um one of the things that really made me decide to definitely go with the publisher I went with was um when I was first pitching this book to to tour um the earth like held up their fingers a triangle uh and said that they thought one of things that was really interesting about the book was that like it is sort of this in this tension between the fictional world of the book, the real world we really live in, and Moby Dick. And everything in the book kind of encourages you to view it through those three lenses. So the the thing with the story of Jonah is it is about the science fiction reality of this is how I's world works, but it's also about the real world, this is how arguably people use religion in the real world, and it's also about this is just a bit from Moby Dick. And it's that intersection is kind of where the story lives.

SPEAKER_04 31:58

As I've said, and I will probably continue to say I have not read Moby Dick. But as far as I know, I'm gonna I'm really sorry. No, it's relevant to the it's it's relevant to my um to my point. But as far as I know, there's no love story, especially a queer love story in Moby Dick. Um correct?

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Mostly. Okay, so so there is so in Moby Dick, there is uh queer readings of Moby Dick are very, very common. Oh, okay. Um like so okay, so okay, in Moby Dick, canonically, um, Ishmael and Quequeg do meet by sharing a bed together. They do wake up with Quequeg wrapped around Ishmael and him actively saying they're like husband and wife. I believe he does kiss him on the mouth at one point and like specifically says they are married now. I think so um the way I would put this is um I very much don't believe in projecting modern ideas onto the past, but I also don't believe in erasing queer narratives. I will say, pretty much every Melville scholar I listened to while I was um while I was working on the book was very defensive about the queer quick and ishmailer fucking interpretation. On the other hand, if you go outside of mainstream scholarship, you get a lot more no Ishmael and Quickwaker definitely fucking interpretation. The the line I personally take is that um the line I and this is this is this this is this is flippant, this is a bit of a soundbite, is there is no textual evidence in Moby Dick that Ishmael is sexually attracted to Queequick. There is also no textual evidence in Pride and Prejudice that Elizabeth is sexually attracted to Darcy. But modern straight people are accorded the privilege of projecting their extremely 21st century understanding of what a romantic relationship and a loving relationship looks like onto Elizabeth and Darcy, even though it exists in a completely different cultural context. And my feeling is we should allow modern queer people to project the same dynamic onto Ishmael and Kuiqua, because they they behave towards each other in ways that look super gay to a modern audience, and you can say, well, oh, it was different in the time, and like yeah, well yes, but marriage was different in the time as well. Like yeah, you'd if if two guys kissing and sharing a bed isn't gay because it was normal, then by the same context, a man and a woman g going into what is essentially a land management business together that happens to be called a marriage isn't heterosexual, it's just a social contract that doesn't exist anymore. Sorry, that's my um that that's my queer Moby Dick rant. So it's it's it's like there's not a there's not a consensus accepted canon romance in Moby Dick. A lot of people think Ishmael and Queen won't go fucking.

SPEAKER_04 35:01

Okay. So on the assumption that there is not, you have inserted one, and on the idea that they are, you have amped this up massively. So how does that change the dynamics and tensions in character relationships? Because in the in Moby Dick, Quequeg, there's racial tensions, I believe, because Quequeg is not white American.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 35:27

So you're swapping racial tensions for a closer relationship between I and Q, possibly, because they are not just sharing a that they're fucking as well as sharing a bed.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Definitely fucking.

SPEAKER_04 35:41

But you've also got tensions with the crew over I's relationship with A, because the crew know that they're also fucking. And when the crew become more and more unhappy with A and some of A's actions, they take that out on I because of their relationship. And it's almost like, well, we can't go for the captain, so we're just gonna go for you. You could stop this, and that obviously changes things.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

Basically, yes, I think. Um, so a lot of the one of the things that is really and I don't know how in how deep into the 19th century racial dynamics you want to get, because that goes to some complex places. Because the the original Pequot is kind of a microcosm of 19th century America, and some of that is still very relevant today, and some of it is a lot less relevant today. And even the bits that are relevant today don't necessarily make sense when you port them into a post-nationalistic far future. So, yes, exactly. So part of it was so and obviously part of it is just like you know, part of the reason that there's more on-page spies in the book is just you know I like kissing, I write kissing books, that's my deal. Like, um, but part of it is yes, about taking sources of tension that were in the book that wouldn't really translate to a modern audience and replacing them with something more directly accessible and somewhat less problematic and also more sort of directly engaging. Um like um, I think I think the other so I think the other thing that I'm often that I've often been doing with the ro with the romance is that like although so in my you know broader romantic work I will always try to make sure that you know a a a love story is also saying something about the characters, that sex scenes are also say also saying something about things about the characters, and there's definitely a reading of Moby Dick where pretty much pretty much everybody that Ishmael interacts with is saying something about Ishmael saying something about society. There is a so although there is an interpretation that Ishmael is fucking Queekweg, there is not an interpretation that Ishmael is fucking Ahab, but clearly Ahab has a tremendous hold and power over Ishmael. Clearly Ahab is a tremendous draw for Ishmael and for the whole crew. Um one of the reasons that um one of the one of the reasons that uh I does have an on-page relationship with Loc in Hell's Heart is that um Starbuck in Moby Dick doesn't have the same like fascinating allure for Ishmael that Ahab and Queakwake have, but he's got this he represents something very important that is part of the tension that arguably exists within Ishmael's character and also exists within you know society as a whole. Like um, so Starbuck is often seen as standing for rationality, that's why the Starbuck standing character is called Locke, you know, the rationalist philosopher. Um, you know, Starbuck is always the one who is saying, um, like kind of what are you doing? Keep your eye on the mission. It's just a fucking whale, my guy. Um and so basically, um so basically, uh I use sex to draw that out. And it's very much about the tensions within I's personal drives and also society. But with more fucking.

SPEAKER_04 39:22

Nothing wrong with more fucking. This is the part where we get into spoilers of Hell's Heart and some of the creative decisions and the ending. So if you haven't read Hell's Heart, then I recommend you go read it, finish it, then come back and rejoin me and Alexis as we move closer towards Hell's Heart. A uses a kind of AI type of navigation. There's a computer on board and you can ask it questions, and it's obviously all to do with hunting the Mobius beast because A is has this monomania about Mobius Beast. Learned that from Wikipedia today, and I'm very proud of the fact that I like monomania, it's a it's a good term, I like it.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Great term.

SPEAKER_04 40:16

How does that make things more interesting for you as a writer? Because again, it it it kind of changes things from the original Moby Dick, where maybe they're having to rely on compasses or looking at stars. Oh, okay, so that's whereas now you've got she can ask it a question and it will give her an answer. And it kind of takes part, it almost takes some of the decisions about what they're doing out of A's hands because they're following this computer.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

So this is a really interesting one because um, okay, so at some point we might have to like really deep dive into 19th century racism. Um so there's some very famous characters in Moby Dick. So you've got Queekwick, you've got Starbucks, you've got Ahab. A character that if you've not read it and that if you uh that m probably got mentioned in the Wikipedia summary, but you might have skipped over because it doesn't get talked about a lot, is Fidella. Um one of the things that people say about Melville is that actually, so for example, the portrayal of Quequick and Moby Dick, particularly by the standards of the 19th century, is incredibly progressive. Again, by the Sangers of the 19th century, which isn't saying a lot. But like Quequeg is a fully humanised character. One of the things that comes across really clearly in Moby Dick from my perspective is that Quequeg's people have their own shit going on and they don't actually need Europeans to come and civilise, and that's something actually Melville was Melville was extremely anti-colonialist. Like Melville's like openly came out and said, These people don't need us, these people are fine, we shouldn't go fuck with them. Um in a lot of ways, by the sounds of his day, he was you know he was also an abolitionist, he was extremely anti-racist by the sounds of his day. Also, there is a character in Moby Dick called Fidela, who is a sinister Persian. And oh my god, is that like a racist stereotype? Um and actually, so you talk about um like yes, they have to rely on compasses, they have to rely on dead reckoning, they have whereas um whereas A can just ask this machine. The computer is called Fidelity, specifically because it is there to replace the character of Fidella. And one of the one of the complex things about when you're when you're doing an adaptation of a book that has historical racist elements in it, where a historic where a character in the book is plays a role in the book that's just kind of irreducibly racist. You either preserve the character's ethnicity and radically change the role in the book, and also I am not myself Persian, I do not really have particular insight in the yeah, I've known Iranian people, but I've not like I'm not a like a I'm not deep in that culture. Um, or you preserve the role in the book, but do it with something very different. And so the reason there's an AI in it is because actually, yes, real people in the 19th century, the way they would navigate is they would use compasses, they'd use things like Ahab has a wizard. Ahab like actually has like a an ethnic stereotype wizard who and like and and the role of Fidala in Moby Dick is to be this sinister force that is almost like a manifestation of Ahab's obsession. That is a that is actually doing the exact job you're saying the AI does, which is of being something that guides Ahab that is beyond what is normal for a 19th century ships captain. Um and like obviously you have to be really careful when you are replacing a character that in the original is a human being from a marginalized ethnic group, and you're replacing something non human, but My feeling was that like Fidala's role in the book is such a dehumanized role that actually just replacing him with like basically what Fidala does is basically what an AI does today. Like um, because I think one of the things that's really important about the way um as I because I tend to do major lessons, I've listened to a lot of things like the Hoggas, and I I'd I've I've noticed you quite often talk about AI with people because I think it's probably something you're interested in, maybe. I can't tell.

SPEAKER_04 44:26

I think it's just because it's becoming such a more modern thing, and I think a lot of people are touching on it and exploring it more in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 44:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:33

That's why I bring it up.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

And to me, what's really important about my flippant line about AI is that I'm not scared of the AI apocalypse and I'm not scared about it, scared of the AI revolution, but I'm absolutely terrified of the AI status quo. Which is to say of this technology basically just being used to cement existing power structures to make rich people richer, um, to preserve injustices that currently exist. Um one of the things that's important about the way fidelity works in Hell's Heart, and that I would argue is also more or less the role Fidella plays in Moby Dick, is all it's because you say she can just ask the computer, she can just ask the computer, and like the the big example we get of her asking the computer something is um so she is the bit where she's deciding whether to go through the go through the the the massive electrical storm, and she very specifically asks the computer whether she should do it in such a way that the computer knows she wants the answer yes, and so it says yes. And like what so what the AI actually does in the book isn't answer questions for her, it's tells her what she wants to hear, it reflects her own worst impulses back at her. So it's it's not really a tool, it's a it's it's it's it it's an algorithmic psychological worsening machine, which is arguably what AI actually is.

SPEAKER_04 46:04

I definitely figured that a used it as justification for things that she was doing. So if you ask it a question in a certain way, it will give you an answer. Be like, aha, so yes, I've asked the machine, the machine says yes, we're gonna go do it. It's fine.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Which is yeah, I as far as I can say a lot of what people use AI for.

SPEAKER_04 46:24

I probably I'm sure I have tweaked questions slightly if AI doesn't tell me what I want to hear.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

Well, it uh because people don't it's it's genuine it's genuinely dangerous, especially because like people are using it for more and more serious decisions now, like up to around including like you know high-end governmental shit. Like it's um it's mildly terrifying.

SPEAKER_04 46:47

I'm really interested in religion because how it's different in Moby Dick compared to Hell's Heart. And the one incident that I'm really thinking of is we have Marsh falling into the spermaceti, and he just becomes way more religiously extreme, and it goes on and goes on. Like wearing the whale coats, and then the the basically baptism in whale guts that is so gross. Yeah, again, in the book.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

Um, it's horrible, it's kind of horrible. Um, it's um so uh so there's a whole lot to unpack with with with Marsh specifically, so I don't know whether you want to talk about that or about um uh religion in general.

SPEAKER_04 47:31

Um well we can do both, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

Uh so Marsh's religion is uh in there for a couple of reasons. So, first first of all, it's in there as a way of again trying to remind the reader that most people in the book aren't white because it's set in a post-Earth future. Um white people are not the majority of human beings on Earth, so in a post-Earth future it doesn't make sense that the majority of human beings are white. Uh and it's also kind of a post-racial future where most people don't really think about identity in that way unless you're a fucked up white supremacist, which is basically what the Church of Story Wisdom is. Um the other thing about the Church of Story Wisdom is that it's um I wanted there to be a Lovecraftian element to the book because it's about hunting giant space monsters, and increasingly I feel complicated about engaging with Lovecraftian ideals without engaging with the fact that Lovecraft was, say it with me now, a massive racist. Um and like really, and like really like you know, to the extent that there are reviews from the time, and the time is America in the 30s, where people are like, you know, I I think this guy just doesn't like immigrants very much. Um so again, like like with the triangle thing, where it's partly about Moby Dick, it's partly about the real world, it's partly about the imaginary world of the book, so it's partly there to engage with the the weird Lovecraftian aspect of the book. It's part of the source text, it's partly it's partly stage with the weird Lovecraftian aspect of the science fiction world building, of that there is this world where there are these giant space whales that are sort of these Lovecraftian entities that we kill and hunt for fuel. Um it's partly there. So Marsh sort of the bit where Marsh falls into the the Hale of the Leviathan, that happens in the book, but it happens to Tashtago, who is um uh the Native American harpooner. Um and again, it doesn't really make sense to have someone who's Native American in a world where America isn't a thing, um, and where racial entity isn't a thing, or isn't a thing in the same way, unless you're a psychopath. Um and it's partly there because it's because it's a joke about Lovecraft, but it's and it's it's partly there because um Marti's religion is a in some ways quite common is somewhat heavy-handed commentary on the ways in which those ideas of racial supremacy are used to convince impoverished white people to go along with systems that oppress them. Like it's basically, um you know that whole um uh oh uh Linda B Lyndon B. Johnson has a very famous quote that if you can convince the lowest white man that he's better than the best coloured man, he won't notice if you're picking his pocket. And the church of the story wisdom is that elevated the status of literal religion. Um like it's uh a lot of Heltar is quite a bleak take on like things I perceive in the modern world, and um and that there's a there's a little bit in it where he's like kind of carving an idol and the idol is um and the idol is um uh the the leopard that eats the faces of the unbeliever. And that's the obviously a deliberate mimetic reference to the whole I never thought the leopards would eat my face meme, which I don't know if you're familiar with.

SPEAKER_04 50:58

I'm gonna Google this now.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

Uh so okay, so so it's i it's a tweet from like 10 years ago now, but actually originally about Brexit, which is that like um I never thought the leopards would eat my face, says woman who voted for leopards eating people's faces party. And like we we increasingly live in a political moment where it's it seems like there's just genuinely a dominant political force where people will actively vote for bad and destructive things to happen as long as they think those bad and destructive things will primarily affect people they don't like.

SPEAKER_04 51:28

Why would A have given her harpoon to have been blessed?

SPEAKER_00 51:33

Uh, because she's playing. Um, like very specific. Okay, so again, uh I believe in death of the author is ultimately up to the reader. But so that so towards the latter third of the book, there's this power struggle that plays out between Marsh, who has at this point fallen into the whale brains, and is having weird psychic visions and speaking entirely in Shakespeare quotes, who is a sincere believer in his fucked-up religion. And uh Wolfram, who is a complete scam artist, who is just trying to exploit it for his own gain. And A, who is like a is almost both at once in that she is simultaneously a genuine fanatic, but the stuff she is genuinely fanatical about is not what the story wisdom cult are actually genuinely fanatical about, it's her own thing. Um and so, and again, um uh if you want to read that as a metaphor for current situations where hateful political movements are being fought over by people who sincerely believe in them and people who clearly just want to use them to exploit people, both of whom are terrible people, you may read it that way. Um but the at this at that point in the story, the Story Wisdom cult makes up like a third of the crew, and uh what A is doing is nuts, and if the crew turn on her, she's fucked. So she needs to keep them on side. So she goes through this big theatrical thing where she kind of essentially pretends that she's kind of on their side, and that keeps them on side. Uh, it's also again like a lot of things that are weird about the book, there's a scene in Moby Dick where Ahab gets a special harpoon made and does this weird, rich, weird magic ritual, which again I believe Fidola is involved in the book. Um but so it's like it's all the triangle, and and so partly it's because this kind of because that happens in Moby Dick, but in this context, it's also because diegetically A needs them on side, and also because um there are perhaps certain real-world parallels to do with the kind of forces that the Story Wisdom Cult represents and the ways in which people in power engage with and manipulate, but also are affected by those forces.

SPEAKER_04 53:55

And I guess it can't hurt, right?

SPEAKER_00 53:57

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 53:57

But maybe, maybe it's real. You're going after something that has done damage to a lot of people, yes, including yourself.

SPEAKER_02 54:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 54:09

So what's what's the worst that can happen if they smear some whale goes?

SPEAKER_00 54:13

What's the worst can happen if you dedicate yourself to a devouring god that wants to eat the universe? The answer is some pretty terrible things if it's actually true.

SPEAKER_04 54:22

But I think at this point A's kind of resigned to the fact that the whale may it's gonna come down to her or the whale, and I must feel like she doesn't care. She needs that face-to-face meeting and the opportunity to actually try and kill it, and then if she dies in the result, then it's just one of those things.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

Sorry, sorry, that's one of those ones where like kind of again, because I don't like to have terror books for readers, I'm just like, mm-hmm. Yeah, that's that's that's like uh I know I think that's a perfectly valid read in the text. The text is deliberately designed to be ambiguous and to have multiple readings, but that's definitely a way to read it.

SPEAKER_04 55:00

Well, this doesn't seem bothered about fuel for the way home, and there's oh no, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 55:03

Oh no, only like and again, she's yeah, she she she's she definitely thinks this is a one-way trip. Like um it's um and again there's um again it deliberately parallel there's a there's a bit in Moby Dick where Ahab just throws the sexist over the board. Um so that's and the bit where she's like, yeah, we don't need fuel for the return is kind of the point where it becomes very clear she's crossed the line and that there is no going back for her, and the threat it's it's the equivalent of the throwing the sexant over the board bit in Moby Dick because yeah, that that there comes a point where she has committed to that, and why she feels that is again left as an exercise for the reader.

SPEAKER_04 55:41

At the point where Locke is holding the pistol and the captain said the ship is mine, I sort of thought, Locke, just do it. I know obviously that that that's not gonna work with your book because your book is a retelling, but you sort of think, just do it, because you know this is gonna go badly. Like you are the voice of reason, you can't see a way where this is going to go well. And even if you manage to kill the whale, you could be so fucked for your journey home. Just take what you have, you're there for money, just go back. Just kill the captain and go back. Obviously, that's not gonna happen, but it it's frustrating, it's it's frustrating when you see characters doing things and you're like, but you you know you're making the wrong decision here.

SPEAKER_00 56:25

Yeah, although to be fair, to be fair, it would also be murder, justified murder. And that's um what I think the captain's insane. I don't know, she is is she insane or is she madness maddened? Is she the only sane person on the crew? Uh it's um so uh one of the things I I I I I find particularly because the book is intentionally a Moby Dick thing, I th I I find people's different interpretations are interesting. Because don't get me wrong, you're not wrong. Yes, definitely, if Locke had just shot the captain dead in that moment, they would have saved a ton of lives. They would have actually you know got back home and actually, I've ironically been quite wealthy. Um and again, again, there is a similar scene in Moby Dick where the exact same thing happens, but and but but of course also so like so because the book is set in this horrific late-stage capitalist dystopia, and Locke's role in the book is the one who makes the stage the case for just living by the standards of the horrific late-stage capitalist like Locke is the voice of the dystopia. Locke makes a I hope a very plausible case for their dystopia being good, actually, or at the very least, for that for the way to react to that dystopia being just kind of getting on with it and playing your role in your horrific dystopian society as best you can because you can't possibly hope for anything better. Um so yeah, they would have saved a lot of lives, but also what Locke is offering is nothing changes, everything just carries on the way it is, and we don't try and make anything better, we just accept the way things are. And in some ways that's quite a that's quite a despairing thing to accept. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of despair in the book. Horny and despairing is basically the emotional tenor of the book, and um and so yeah, you can absolutely say yes fucking do it, but then and you know like and then what and then you go back to and you know and Locke's got a pretty decent life because Locke is middle management, but like one of the things the captain says is like most most of these people are they they live hand-to-mouth existences. Like, is it is it perhaps better for them to go out in one final blaze of glory? And you know, Locke's answer is no, you're being a fucking narcissist, and that is a very reasonable argument. But um, yeah, you know, like a a lot of what the book engages with is and maybe maybe this is just me. Maybe uh other people don't feel the same way, but there's again sorry, I'm a very metatextual person, which is why I keep referencing the fact I listen to other episodes of your podcast, and I don't know if you're gonna want to edit that stuff out, but like I've noticed a lot of the people you interviewed recently have been like, well, I'm a bit depressed about the state of the world at the moment, so I wrote this book. Um and this is one of those I'm a bit depressed about the state of the world at the moment, so I wrote this book, books. Um, and a lot of it is about how people cope with the genuine existential despair of living in the increasingly fucked world we find ourselves living in. And um, and yeah, the captain is nuts, but also their world is nuts, society is nuts, everyone on the ship is nuts. Arguably, Loc is just nuts in a more socially acceptable way. Because is it is it really sane to say that yes, this is fine? Like, yeah, Locke is the is the dog with the coffee cup.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:00

It feels to me like the crew are kind of stuck between these two big forces of power that they cannot hope to really overthrow. You've got Locke and this very capitalist society and living hand to mouth, but you're living, and there's always that opportunity in the future, or there is the captain and the blaze of glory. Yeah, and you can't really get off the ship. No, so if the captain decides, well, we're gonna go for the whale and you're probably gonna die, there's not really much they can do. There are a few opportunities, and I'm gonna ask a question about I in a minute to do with opportunities, but at the point when it's like electrical storm whale, they really can't do much. And when you're there at the whale, it's like you know, you can't really be like, Yeah, I'm peaceing out now, I don't actually want to do this. No, you're fucked. Yeah, so I know which way I would go, and yes, capitalist society is very bleak, but I think I'd rather be alive.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

Don't get me wrong, that is a completely valid reasoning. I th I think I'd rather make my peace with the world I live in than get myself and everyone around me non-consensually killed fighting a giant whale is a very reasonable position to have. Um, but I I I hope A's take is understandable at least. But I mean, you are right that is a giant fucking hypocrite who completely denies accrue agency, but then that's a side who denies them agency as well, because like because it's just so fair, it's bad.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:34

A cares about immortality. Yes, or like that idea is brought up, and the immortality is gonna come with killing the whale and sort of being this story. I'm the one who bested the Mobius beast. However, if you die and all of your crew die, even if you kill the whale, who is alive to tell your story? And that is a very big possibility that no one will survive this. Yes, who's gonna tell your story? Are you immortal if no one's around to keep you immortal?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:04

And I think that there's obviously two ones. So obviously for the first answer to that is well, who's gonna tell you the one person that writes a um the one person that writes a writ the great American novel about it. But you don't know. But obviously she can't predict that will happen. Um although uh so I mean one of the things that is difficult about people with like grandiose visions is that they don't consider that question. I think one of like something I don't necessarily want to give a definitive answer on with A is whether the kind of immortality she is going for is the and I will be famous for killing this thing kind of immortality, or the I will be famous for being the person whose ship was destroyed by this thing kind of immortality, which is effectively the kind of immortality she gets, and it's the kind of immortality that Ahab gets, and is sort of the kind of immortality that the real life captain of the Essex got, because Melbourne was partly inspired by a real thing that happened to a real whaling ship. Although to be fair, the real the real story there was they hunted a whale like normal and it sank the boat, and the captain wasn't a monomaniac. Um but there is an extent to which maybe the kind of immortality I is going well that I is going for is a much more nihilistic immortality. Again, there's a lot of nihilism in the book. Um and there and possibly it's a much more nihilistic immortality, it's much more a craving for oblivion, a just to because I I think probably there is from my interpretation again, I do not interpret my own books for people, but possibly I don't actually think A cares if she gets remembered. I think she cares that she has done it for herself. There's um there's a whole bit in um there's a whole through line in um in Modic where Ahab is genuinely trying to like it's not it's not just I want to kill this big whale, it's like Ahab sincerely believes that confronting the whale is the same thing as confronting God in a very real sense. And there's an extent to which like what she's after isn't fame or glory, it's it's drawing a line in the sand, even against the universe itself, and saying, I will not abide this. I will throw everything at pursuing what might be vengeance or might be justice or might be an attempt to like kind of so one of the one of the biggest influences um on like kind of the that's the interpretation is a lecture I again listened to while I was working on the book about from a relatively serious Melville scholar talking about the idea that Ahab is actually a heroic figure, and you can interpret Ahab as a heroic figure who stands for humanity and who demands a reckoning for humanity from the impersonal forces of the cosmos. And I I don't know, I don't know how common that is in interpretation, maybe Dick. I'm not a real Melville scholar. Um I don't interpret my own books for people, so that's not necessarily A's canon reasoning, but it was actually something that informed the way I wrote her, that she sees herself as in a sense, I know you're a this this is called the demithology, but it's it's that very Promethean thing. It's that very like kind of straight up defy defying the gods and the cosmos itself. And you know, even if no one tells you a story, you still did it, and you go to your grave knowing you did it.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:45

And you end up as essence in a whale's head.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:53

Q sees I becoming sort of more enthralled by the captain, and they don't have a jealous relationship. Relationship, I is very much well, we're gonna fuck, but I'm also gonna fuck other people, and it's kind of like a understanding between them. But she is Q is genuinely worried about the relationship with A, and I think the probably a combination of A's megalomania and the thrall that A puts I in just by being, and she tells I to leave. I was kind of thinking, but they're in space, how's that gonna work? But we have the GAMS with the other ships. So, what would have been the consequences if I had wanted to leave, which obviously was never gonna happen, but just hypothetically, if she was like, you know what, you're right, I should leave, and then decided to hop ship.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:47

So I uh in so in some way, in some way, I mean so if the peak had survived, then she'd still be kind of under contract to the pequad and to Olympus extraction state.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:55

But again, I mean, she already owes her entire body to to a pharmaceutical mega cop, so that's not she's not really the worst situation. Um, like Wolfram at the end of the book does in fact jump ship. Um so it is a thing you can do, and it's um so in a sense, yeah, it would it would have been a better outcome for her. Um and it's oh obviously, so what one of the ships did have a plague on board, that wouldn't have been so great. But um it it would have been risky. Um and I think the other thing I'll say is is that when so although although I and Q don't have a jealous relationship, I think when she's when she's telling her to leave, I think she is as much leaves like you know, leave emotionally, stop being emotionally obsessed with this person who is clearly insane, um, as well as leave the ship. Um because even though like it is again pretty much outright stated, I think, in the epilogue that Q is pretty clear the ship is doomed past a certain point, because yes, the caption is clearly nuts. Um but um but but because the book is inspired by a freaking work of transcendental fiction, um there is an extent to which eve even if they stay on the peak odd and just all die with everyone else, there is a an extent to which there is a value I think Q perceives a value for A in just not being drawn into the the orbit of this woman who cares about nothing except her monomaniacal vision of standing defiant against the very heavens themselves. Like you don't want to be even if the ship hadn't been destroyed, it would not have been emotionally helpful.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:42

I know Wolfram jumped ship, but I figured because he wasn't contracted, he was a prisoner, yeah, sort of turned cult member, it might have been different. I mean it might have worked like contractually, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:56

So with world building in general, like kind of you should always know more than is in the book, but there are levels of detail, and I I haven't gone into the exact details of um uh of exodite contract law. I mean I was one of the things I was other things I will say is that it's very possible that like um because the what so the the way payment works on the hunter box and in Hell's Heart is the same way that payment works on the whaling ship in Moby Dick, which is the real way it worked in real life, which is you are paid a share of the voyage. So there's an extent to which if you there's an extent to which if you bail, it just means that the company keeps your share of the profits. So it's not actually it's probably like in a sense they've not paid you anything, they kind of like they probably again because the um because the this version I said is slightly more capitalistic You'd probably owe them for like your room and board and they'd probably you know try and get money out of you by whatever means they could just because they can. But in terms of like the company doesn't take that much of a loss if someone jumps ship because they don't pay them until the end, and they pay them a share of the voyage, and if they don't have to pay them that they get to keep it.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:11

It seemed nuts to me at points where you find out they're actually spending money to be on the ship. Yeah. And they've not been paid. It's like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll just take this out of your money at the end. It's like so you could effectively leave with nothing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

Yeah, and and I will say for one, that's that's not how it works in Moby Dick, the book, but it is partly because the setting is more hyper-capitalistic, although it is also like um, although that's not a feature of Moby Dick, like the company store was a real thing. Like in the Gilded Age of the 19th century, you really would have this thing where like you would work for a company and the company would run the town and you would have to buy everything from the company, and you could genuinely yeah, it's like the like the famous song, you load 16 tons, what do you get another day older and deeper in debt? Like you could do a full day's work and wind up owing the company money. Um, and yeah, it's a very exploitative society, which is it like and again, it's when you're trapped in that cycle. I'm hoping you can at least see why you might think that a rational response is fuck it, let's charge down the throat of a whale.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:06

Why did you choose to have Q survive at the end?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:12

Good. So, as I assume you're aware from Wikipedia ring, uh, Q does uh Quickware does not survive in Moby Deck. Um partly um so um one of the things I've I've touched on is the by 19th century standards, Melville was surprisingly progressive in his attitudes to race. Um Melville, as I understand it, Melville's like attitudes to ethnicity and the world and all of this is a very 19th-century philosophy that we call cosmopolitanism, in that he truly and so much of and again there's jokes about this in the book constantly. Um much of Moby Dick is about it's like a metaphor for the universal connectedness of humanity, like all of the weird, almost science fiction-coded bits where it's like this is how the boat works, and in the boat they work like this. It's to some extent, it's Melville talking about how connected um all humans are to all other humans, and um in the book, just like in the in Hell's Heart, Queequeg builds a coffin, and the coffin acts as a life raft for Ishmael at the end. And again, spoilers for 175-year-old novel. Um part of the like kind of the core message of Moby Dick the book is that like Ishmael survives in a very real sense because of his connection with Queequeg, because he reached out and embraced this person that the whole of his society is telling him is a savage and a cannibal. And the one bit where I'll tell you turn around and say, like, the portrayal of Queequeg is kind of racist, is you're like, well, yeah, but but Queequeg reached out and embraced Ishmael and didn't get to live. Um I think so I I very much did not want the person who was the stand-in for the indigenous coded character whose relationship with the protagonist is the thing that makes them survive, just fucking died. Because that struck me as odd. But I think the other thing is that like so I think ultimately again it's a I'm a bit upset about the state of the world today book. And one of the things that I hope comes through is that every single person in that on that ship to some extent is completely broken by the society they live in, by the I'm saying existential despair a lot, because is by the existential spare of living society they live in. And to an extent, when the ship is and yeah, and the r the reason that there is any plausibility at all to the captain's argument that you know we might as well just all die is that they are completely trapped in the society that they cannot find a way out of. And Q's whole thing is that she is not part of that society, she's outside that society, she comes from old earth, from a society which all of Exodite society says is evil, but which is actually finacy and which genuinely does things differently. She's the only person on the Pequad, my version of the Pequad, um, who is capable of imagining a path that isn't either fully participate in late-stage capitalist society or die. And so it's kind of so from that perspective, it is kind of important that she doesn't die because what kills them isn't really the whale. Like, oh my god, this is so like kind of you know, we live in a society, but ultimately what kills them isn't the whale, it's that context, and she doesn't have that context, therefore she survives, and because she forms a connection with I survives.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:03

I was glad that you let Q survive. Yeah, no, but I like the fact that they spent some time together afterwards. It was sad that I had to leave or cho chose to leave, but it we got s a somewhat of a happy ending from the book full of despair.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:24

No, it's um yeah, like it's uh it's I I almost briefly like it's yeah, it's it's basically again it's basically it's the happiest ending you can get the a sorry a in the sense of a list, not in the sense of the character, um, that both preserves uh th the conceit under which the book was written, because by definition, if I had just gone and lived on Earth with Q, she'd never written the book, she wouldn't have had to. Um and which also you know sticks to the whole again, sort of a slightly bleak um assumption of the uh the dystopian setting, which is that that I think like I have I have I have I it's difficult to have feelings about one's own book, obviously, because like you know, I could have written however I wanted. But um I do yeah, I'd say it is sad, and I do find I do find the fact that I get to the point where sh even because you talk earlier about like what if she just left the ship, what if she just listened to Q earlier and just got on another fucking boat? And like similarly, what if she just stayed on Earth and like learned to be happy and ultimately the answer is she's she's not there emotionally because of how she was raised, because of the world she lives in, because the because everything that surrounds her is so all-encompassing and so like destroying. Um partly because like if she if she's saying the book wouldn't exist, but partly because like it's yeah, it's it's it's I can't get into I think saying and that is her tragedy makes like a complete wanker, but basically that's kind of it's it's yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a bit of a downer ending in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:12

I know what a way to end the interview. I kind of like that meta thing about the book as well, where there are points where I is talking to you directly and acknowledges it's like, okay, so this is the book that I have written. Yes. And those little touches. I thought that was that was very cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:36

Yeah, no, it's um a sorry, dunno how how you if you want me to expand on that, but uh something I do uh I do a lot. I don't I don't I don't know how many of you are you are with my other work and it's probably vulgar to ask, but um uh something something I do a lot is particularly with first-person narration, have a real awareness of the text as a constructed thing that exists and that someone is writing a specific context. Um and obviously with um with Hell's Heart in particular, it's in the context of this weird hyp late-stage hyper-capitalist society. And um in the book does quite a lot with unreliable narration. Like um, there's a a number of things in the book where it's sort of it's strongly implied that that the that I is lying to you. Because again, there's a lot of like unreliable narration in Moby Deck. And um Yeah, I there are certain kinds of book that I like to ha I I think it's this. There are certain kinds of book that I like to have an awareness of the book as constructed artifact. And that's often either as an aid to immersion or as a barrier to immersion. Um, in the sense that um either it's about um helping the reader imagine that this is really happening and that it really produced this book that you can read, and sometimes it's a more about almost confronting the reader with the idea that well, obviously none of this is real, because obviously it's not really about because it's a very about the real world book in a lot of ways. Like a lot of it is so about this present moment. Um and so in that context, I think a lot of the so like what I said um part of the reason there's a lot of the sorry, am I am I going on too long by the way? I hope this is no no no um part of the reason there's a lot of the bits where she like like she doesn't just directly talk about the fact that she's writing a book, she talks about the fact that the book has been edited, and I some of the and behind the scenes stuff genuinely a lot of the bits talking about edits she made to the book are genuinely put in during editing. So there's um partly as a sort of a partly as an easy, but part and partly partly because there's a whole thing in Melville Scholarship where like it is well known that Melville rewrote Mobile multiple times and sort of changes mind about the kind of book it was, and there's a lot of trying to pick through and work out what's from what bit. Um but part of it is about trying to bring the reader into thinking about how much is this about the fictional world of the text, how much is it about the real world, how much is it about nobody of the text. I could come back to the triangle, it's it's about reminding the reader of the existence of the triangle.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:34

I like really like the moment where we get we're getting up to the big sort of climax, and I says, Oh, like A turned around and kissed me, and it sounds very romantic, and then it's like, yeah, that didn't happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:48

It's like, well, if you're if you're telling us a lie there and you're saying, Oh, actually that didn't happen, how much of what you've told us is not true?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:55

Yeah, there's there's loads of other bits through. Like, there's the um sorry again it shut me up if I'm going on too long. Um, there's the bit where she uh she tells it so like there's a bit where she tells the story to Pandora about Iron Hands, and she says that she doesn't know if he had iron hands or not, and that she'd never met him, but then later on she tells another story where she tells the reader she met him. Um and again, it's about I like um so one of the things that um I I feel like unreliable narration could do three things which is it can be a puzzle box, it can be um about just trying to work out what's true, it can be about emotional exploration, which is it can be about showing that the protagonist is very withholding, and that's primarily its purpose in the book, because I is really cagey because she's deeply damaged and doesn't trust the reader. Um and sometimes it's about challenging the again, it's about highlighting the constructiveness of the text, it's about like because you get if you ask the how much of this is true question often enough, you have to butt up against the answer of none of it is fiction. And hopefully, if you ask that in the right way in this kind of book, you get to, but also all of it because it's about like society man. Um so yeah, so it's um it's a weird book, basically, it's a weird fucking book.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:20

Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:24

No, thank you so much for having me. Um it was great. And again, I I hope I uh have been okay. I hope that I'm what you expected.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:30

No, it's been really good. What have you got coming up in terms of writing plans?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:37

Oh god, um so um I'm very prolific. Um, so I've got uh so in terms of like my whole career, uh what are they going to say?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:48

And then coming up in terms of releases.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:50

Yeah, so in terms of releases, um I've got um so I've got uh in April I've got a book coming out um with Montlake called Never After, which is a uh historical romance um between uh a priest and a wastrel. Um I've got uh Father Material coming out in June, which again the thing I'm most known for is the uh the the London Calling series, which is um boyfriend material, husband material, father material. That's the final book in that trilogy, that's coming out in June. Um my next thing with Tor, so which is my next like thing that's being released into the SFF space rather than released into the romance space, um, is uh I'm trying to think of the best way to picture it. It's um it's what if you were a magical girl in the 90s, and then 30 years after that experience it all started kicking off again and you had to do it again, but you were 45 and married with kids. Roughly. That's gonna hit hard because I'm pushing towards 40 now, so it's it's it's it's actually um uh it's it's it's a okay. Speaking for the other side, it's actually um it's it's it's it's much it's much nicer than it seems. Like um I've I've I'm actually enjoying my 40s.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:06

I like the fact that it is about someone who is older because as much as I love a lot of what I read is about like, oh, this 19-year-old has to do this and has all these magic powers and is kidnapped by a fairy prince, and it's like, oh, I need someone more my age that I can relate to a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:21

I think it's genuinely like there's um again, please tell me if the town is getting too much. I think I I am hoping there is a genuine movement happening because it used to be the case that like you just you couldn't get a book published, it was about someone over 30. Like, I mean, again, depends on the space, depends on the context, but like we have this weird cult. We have this a joke I often make is that there's a like a three-year window where you are too old to play a teenager on American TV, but too young to play their mum. And we have this weird cultural thing where we think people just kind of stop existing at 28, even though actually the vast majority of people achieve nothing in their 20s. Like, yeah, the vast majority of people spend their 20s being lost, confused, and scared. There's actually in so in the The Magical Girl book, there's a um which I'm currently sort of finishing up right now. Um there's a bit where the um which maybe making it to the final raspberry protagonist talks about feeling younger than she had in a while and then reflects on that and realizes that she's using feeling younger to mean feeling better. And something I am in myself trying to trying to internalize is that actually feeling old doesn't have to mean feeling shit. It can mean feeling like you've kind of got your life together, like you've got experience, like you've done stuff, like you're not constantly. I mean, maybe maybe it's just my experience in my 20s, but if you're not just constantly confused and terrified, which was very much my experience of life for a very long time.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:53

Um I like the outlook on things, I think that's good. Very much. I will try and bring that into my 40s when I get there, which is not long. Well, thank you so much. I am really excited to read that when it comes out because that sounds definitely sounds like a bit of me.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:13

Fantastic. Totally might be.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:15

And good luck with because we're talking before Hell's Heart comes out, although I will schedule this for release week. Fantastic. Um I'm excited to see how the book is received and how well it does.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:24

No, same. No, I I uh as always, I'm excited but also terrified because like but thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:34

Thank you, and have a lovely day, and thank you for giving me so much time. No, that's okay. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and Alexis and going on a sexy sapphic space journey with a little bit of despair. Follow me on D Myth Pod and I'll see you again soon for my next episode. I've been Lauren, and today I've been turning pages and hunting the Mobius beast with Alexis Hall.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:36

And call this podcast D Myth Turns the Page.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:40

My special episodes where I go running from my debts, I head off into space and find myself flying into Hell's Heart with Alexis Hall.