Hell's Heart: An Author Interview with Alexis Hall

For our newest interview, we were joined by Alexis Hall to pick their brain about their writing, where do they get inspiration for more stories, their experience in publishing, and, most importantly, about their new sci-fi book, Hell's Heart!

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Thank you for joining us, Alexis! Could you start by introducing yourself?

Hi! I’m Alexis Hall, it feels a bit odd opening with “and I’m the USA Today bestselling author of…” but it’s kinda how you do these things so…I’m the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 novels across a range of genres (although my main focus is romance and within that I’m primarily known for contemporary romance). I write across the LGBTQ+ spectrum and Hell’s Heart is my debut Science Fiction novel.

We would love to know more about Hell’s Heart and what inspired you to write it!

So. Back in 2020, lockdown happened. And I decided that the best way for me to cope with it would be for me to pick a Really Long Book and read a chapter to a day so that when lockdown ended and I still hadn’t finished reading that Really Long Book it would feel like lockdown had gone faster.

The Really Long Book I picked was Moby-Dick (the title has a hyphen, the name of the whale doesn’t, it’s a whole big thing), which has 135 chapters and that, it turns out, wasn’t remotely enough to last the whole of covid. But it was enough to get me incredibly obsessed with Moby Dick and, because I’m a professional novelist, I naturally went quickly to “how would I do an adaptation of this”. And my original thought was “as a fantasy but they’re hunting dragons” but that felt a bit obvious, so instead I went to “as science fiction but they’re hunting space whales on Jupiter.”

Then I shelved the idea for more than a year, but then my agent was speaking to an editor and doing the usual “what’s your dream book” thing, and the editor—who worked at Tor—said they’d always wanted to see Moby Dick as a romance, at which point my agent was all “hold my beer.”

This is your debut science fiction book. How much research did you have to do for the ‘science’ part of the genre? Or did you take more of a creative pass?

So as it happens I do actually have a fairly hard science background, I think for a long time my official bio said that I have a degree in very hard sums from a university that should by all rights be fictional, but I am actually a physical scientist by training so I have a fair amount of (admittedly now slightly outdated) background knowledge about the kinds of science involved in a book about hunting space whales on Jupiter.

On the other hand…I mean the book does also contain space whales, which are about as far from scientifically plausible as you can possibly get.

I’ve actually tried to engage with this in what I hope are some interesting ways, and the book plays with the juxtaposition between the bits that border on hard sf (like trying to take into account the fact that Jupiter’s gravity is twice Earth-normal on average) and the bits that are effectively space fantasy (like the flying psychic whales). There’s a line in the book that kind of sums this up, which I won’t quote fully, where the narrator muses on this contrast by talking about how if you went back to biblical times (she comes from a very religiously conservative background) and told, say, Job about the world she lived in, he’d find all the stuff about spaceships and gas giants completely incomprehensible but the idea of giant flying monsters would be pretty familiar to him.

Also, while I don’t like to make too many claims for my own work, I think it’s very possible that Hell’s Heart contains the most scientifically accurate description of the atmospheric composition of Jupiter ever to be used as dialogue in a sapphic sex scene.

Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which, if any, do you identify with most and why?

The book is a Moby Dick retelling, which means almost the entire cast are intentional parallels for the cast of Moby Dick. On top of that, the three (arguably) most important characters from Moby Dick—Ishmael, Ahab and Queequeg—are reimagined as a sapphic not-exactly-love-triangle and none of them are actually given names.

So the narrator just calls herself “I”. She’s a transfem drifter who escaped from her oppressive religious upbringing in some ways but decidedly not in others. She fills the role taken by Ishmael in the original book, which means, amongst other things, that she starts off openly talking about her suicidal ideation (I feel like people don’t mention this aspect of Moby-Dick enough). She’s very much the reader’s viewpoint into the world but is also in many ways a deeply unreliable narrator.

The captain of the ship (“A”) is the kind of obsessive monomaniacal charisma bomb who you would definitely fall in love with so hard that you didn’t care if she led you to an agonising death in the deep sky. She’s the kind of person who just straight up talks in iambic pentameter half the time and who delivers actual goddamned soliloquies.

The stand-in for Queequeg (“Q”) is a woman from Terra, the ruined shell of Old Earth that the totally right-thinking and definitely not dystopian people of the Commonwealth abandoned after they’d stripped it of all of its resources. She speaks almost entirely in Latin, is the only person on the crew not to be suffering from a terminal case of late-stage capitalist brainrot, and is absolutely not interested in anybody’s shit.

As for identification, this feels like a bit of a copout but as the author you kind of have to know where everybody is coming from. Plus I think if you single one character out as the one you identify with the most, people tend to read a bit too much into that.

And which characters do you hope your readers will connect with the most?

Normally I’d find this one hard to answer but because the book is so closely structured around Moby-Dick there’s an extent to which I—the narrator and Ishmael stand-in—is almost the only answer here. Within the narrative structure of the book there’s an extent to which because she’s the one telling the story, and because the story is at least partly allegorical, all of the other characters to exist to be in dialogue with her and her perception of the world.

Probably the one exception here is Q, because it was really important to me that indigenous-coded character come across as a fully realised human being with her own stuff going on. Although having said that, part of what makes her come across that way is that we’re never fully inside her head so we always suspect there’s things she isn’t telling us. And that might make finding spaces of identification difficult.

The list of books with your name on them is insanely long! Where would you direct readers to next? Any stories that hold a particularly special place in your heart?

Where to go next depends on what you’re after and what you liked about Hell’s Heart.

If you liked that it was sapphic and had SFF elements then you might want to look at the Mortal Follies series, which begins with a sapphic romance between the disgraced daughter of an earl and a young woman under a curse.

If you liked that it was a closer-than-it-has-to-be retelling of a classic story and was also completely gonzo, try The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, which is “Sherlock Holmes only Holmes is a pansexual sorceress who hates the world almost as much as she hates herself and Watson is a transmasc puritan whose religion worships Azathoth”. Thinking about it, that also makes it a good choice if you liked the “trans narrator has complex relationship with their religious upbringing” aspect.

If you care less about the magic-and-spaceships genre elements but you really liked that it was about falling in love with a cool but unbelievably toxic woman, then I’d recommend Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot. It’s part three of a series of books about contestants on a Totally Original Baking Show Do Not Steal but each one stands alone (although they have characters in common because the show always has the same crew).

If you want a romance with a transfem protagonist then A Lady for a Duke is probably your best bet.

If you just want to read my most popular thing then that would—unless the sales metrics have changed without me noticing—be the London Calling series, consisting of Boyfriend Material, Husband Material and (as of this June) Father Material.

Is there something in the publishing industry that is now coming much easier? Or have you perhaps encountered a new challenge?

Honestly, because I bounce around so much between genres and publishers, it’s always hard to know what’s changing trends and what’s just different companies being different. Plus the wider context of, like, the world is changing really rapidly now so it’s hard to say anything for definite. Like if you’d asked me this question two years ago I’d probably have said “it’s getting easier to publish LGBTQ+ fiction” but even then I’d have caveated it with “but that might change in the future” and I’d now caveat it with “but that stands a significant chance of changing quite soon actually.”

Is there a genre or trope that you haven’t tried writing yet but that you’d love to?

Honestly it’s getting perilously close to the point where I’ve done a good chunk of them already. I’ve done sf, fantasy, romantasy, cosy mystery, multiple different romance subgenres, and so on. I’ve vaguely been thinking it might be nice to do something really deep into Space Opera. 

Could you share a bit of your experience with writer’s block? With dozens and dozens of stories created by your pen, do you get stuck on what to do next? Where do you find new inspiration?

In a way I think the “dozens and dozens of stories” thing makes writer’s block a bit of a non-issue for me. I’ve usually got two or three things on the go at once, especially when you take planning, editing, and secondary material like, say, answering interview questions into account. So if I get stuck on one project I can usually just jump to another to take my mind off it. And the other aspect of the dozens and dozens of stories thing is that it means I almost always have a deadline looming, and so over the years I’ve had to get pretty good at just getting something down to a time limit.

Something I think it’s really important to understand about writing is that as cool and romantic as it sounds, it ultimately is just a job like any other and unless you get to a very high level of success you do have to get the job done whether you like it or not. And in a similar vein I think it’s important to remember that the whole adage about writing being rewriting is a cliché for a reason. Often the times I’ve had the most “writer’s block” is when I’ve already had something written but I’m looking at it in editing and thinking “I feel like this line could land harder but I can’t work out how.”

We’d love a hint about any of your current projects! Anything that might surprise your readers?

So as always I have a whole bunch of balls in the air at once but the one I’m working on most directly right at this moment, and the next book for Tor, is about a woman who was a magical girl in the 1990s, thought that part of her life was over, and is now discovering that everything she fought against thirty years ago is coming back, only worse and more complicated and it’s directly threatening her wife and kids.

Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, or games you’re enjoying at the moment? Any recommendations for our audience? Bonus points if it includes sapphics!

Well, I’m really excited The Muppet Show is apparently back? I know Miss Piggy isn’t technically sapphic, because she’s in a long-term relationship with Kermit (then again, that could be a lavender .. um … emerald marriage?) she is definitely a queen. I just finished reading Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens, which is a sapphic western. It’s not a love story exactly; it’s more of a bildungsroman, but it’s absolutely marvellous. Basically it’s like if Deadwood, Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, and Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted got into a polyamorous situation & contrived to have a child together. In terms of gaming, I just finished a playthrough of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood – a visual novel about identity,  tarot cards and, given the way I played it, terrible decision-making. While there is a set romantic path I think you can go down, I didn’t happen to go down it (the heroine coded aroace to me and I wanted to honour that), but the vibes of the game are deeply sapphic in general. I mean, it’s about witch girls in space.

About the Author

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in their purse, and nothing particular to interest them on shore, Alexis Hall thought they would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Unfortunately the boat they were in sank with all hands, and they were rescued only by a passing whaler. They have since become a novelist.