Thoughts and Opinions
Well...
The tag line at Barnes & Noble was "sapphic Gideon the Ninth meets Moby Dick... in space!"
And the sapphic part is accurate. But Gideon the Ninth? Eh, I dunno.
But I will say it is definitely better than Moby Dick.
And it's done. Okay. So, this was my first reading of anything by Alexis Hall. I knew nothing about them before getting into this, and I still basically know nothing about them.
I have to say it was an interesting read. The 'sapphic' part of it was a thing, but honestly, it didn't make much difference to me. Whether they protagonist was gay/lesbian or not was kind of irrelevant to me. It did work in a way, and that's really all I have on that.
The retelling of Moby Dick was a lot more interesting to me. I tried reading the original Moby Dick years ago and I just couldn't get into it. I watched the Patrick Stewart movie version later and it was a lot better. I think Melville's rambling digressions are what got me. His bits on the biology of whales was, eh, lacking, or too much and kind of wrong. But exobiology of critters that aren't real, on a gas giant? Yeah, I'll take that. And it worked. It interesting and engaging.
And the ending? There is a bit of tongue in cheek line about 'come on, you have to have guessed it by now', and yes, I had. There is a lot of fourth wall breaking, or is there? It's written as a memoir with the narrator basically talking straight to the read, as if they were an easily distracted person sitting right in front of you. It's a style. I don't hate it. Sperm. That word gets used a lot. And I feel like it was used for comedic effect. Eh, I get it. But it didn't make me giggle that was the narrator/writer wrote it to be. And I suppose you could see it different ways. The narrator is kind of immature, the writer is a little, their playing it up for comedic effect. I dunno, I choose to believe that it is how the narrator is supposed to sound.
And lastly, I did enjoy the depictions of future religions of people's well beyond earth, after society on earth basically collapsed and the remnant of humanity took to the stars. How captialism on crack took hold and Big Pharma get really big, and mixed with capitalism/mercantalism, plus a colonial extraction economy. The space whales are full of sperm and that sperm is basically 19th Century whale, but better. Just don't fall in.