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The Uncontinented Stars
A queer, science-fiction re-imagining of Moby-Dick.
The year is 2776. When celebrated xenozoologist Abelard Cousteau returns five years after his assumed death following an accident in deep space, he seeks out his former protégé, Noah Starbuck, to accompany him on his first post-resurrection assignment. The two of them and the other six in their crew are tasked with auditing the first batch of humanity's exoplanet research bases, but Abelard's attention is focused elsewhere--on the creature that allegedly caused his accident, the creature he and Noah studied as theory, the creature he now wants to kill.
Still, too, is the issue of the research bases. Founded as part of an effort to backfill extinct ecological niches after averting climate collapse, their purpose appears innocent enough. But as the mission unfolds, darker motives creep to the surface, just as Abelard's quest for revenge tugs too hard at arcane secrets of existence.
The Uncontinented Stars questions humanity's place in the universe as well as our individual places in the galaxy of our fellow humans--and what we owe each other.
The year is 2776. When celebrated xenozoologist Abelard Cousteau returns five years after his assumed death following an accident in deep space, he seeks out his former protégé, Noah Starbuck, to accompany him on his first post-resurrection assignment. The two of them and the other six in their crew are tasked with auditing the first batch of humanity's exoplanet research bases, but Abelard's attention is focused elsewhere--on the creature that allegedly caused his accident, the creature he and Noah studied as theory, the creature he now wants to kill.
Still, too, is the issue of the research bases. Founded as part of an effort to backfill extinct ecological niches after averting climate collapse, their purpose appears innocent enough. But as the mission unfolds, darker motives creep to the surface, just as Abelard's quest for revenge tugs too hard at arcane secrets of existence.
The Uncontinented Stars questions humanity's place in the universe as well as our individual places in the galaxy of our fellow humans--and what we owe each other.
- GenresScience FictionQueer
448 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 21, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 8, 2026
Melville is one of America’s queerer literary greats—not quite Walt Whitman, but still pretty gay, what with all the dudes on boats, male intimacy, boiling vats of sperm, etc. So it’s only mildly surprising that our own queer literary moment has inspired not one but two Moby Dick retellings: Alex Hall’s just-released Hell's Heart and last year’s The Uncontinented Stars. I’d hoped to read and review them together, but as they’re both roughly Moby Dick length, I think one is enough for now.
The Uncontinented Stars was nominated for a 2026 Lambda in Trans Fiction. It stands out amongst the other nominees for being self-published, for having only six ratings on Goodreads, and for being a space opera retelling of Moby Dick.
This is a book for a very particular audience: do you love Moby Dick? Do you love long, involved space operas filled with rich xenobiological analysis? Are you interested in subtle, intimate explorations of queer memory and far-future anti-colonial politics?
It’s been over ten years since I read Moby Dick—a fact I’m taking as a personal attack by the universe. Where have the years gone? How am I supposed to read Moby Dick again when I have so many other books to read? How am I supposed to live my life without remembering Moby Dick clearly enough even to properly review a queer scifi retelling? When I read Moby Dick (just a few years ago, when I was absolutely just as young as I still am because I am young and that’s how time works), I loved it. I hadn’t for a moment expected such pure, unadulterated literary pleasure, one glorious beautiful funny unfolding sentence after another. It’s a truly foolish book to try and retell. And yet, what is art for if not the foolhardy pursuit of the impossible?
It is the distant future. Earth is post-climate catastrophe. The nation-state is no more. The stars are colonized. And academic science has not changed one bit. The doctoral program has apparently proved the single most enduring creation of nineteenth-century humanity. Our narrator Noah Starbuck is a young xenozoologist. His dissertation topic: the legendary, totally theoretical “vacuum leviathan.” Starbuck’s doctoral advisor was the infamous Captain Ahab—whoops, I mean Dr. Abelard Cousteau—who vanished in deep space five years ago. The story kicks off when Cousteau’s body is recovered, and his mind uploaded into a robot. (The radical implications of this technology are under-explored, though I suppose it’s not exactly that kind of science fiction; we’re somewhere in the mushy middle-ground between space fantasy and hard scifi—a place I quite like, actually.)
Newly robotic Dr. Ahab—I mean Cousteau—assembles a crew of xenobiologists to visit some of Earth’s most isolated research colonies, where xenobiology’s greatest minds research alien ecosystems in situ. Spoiler alert—Cousteau’s actually on the hunt for the very vacuum leviathan that attacked his ship and destroyed his body. Noah Starbuck’s role on the crew: to manage his erstwhile advisor and interpret his inexplicable behavior for the others. Academics will be triggered.
Like Captain Ahab, Dr. Cousteau intends to kill his whale. Here, I think, Moby Dick’s influence led Haden Cross a little astray. Whalers kill whales, obviously. Scientists study whales. No one was confused or distressed enough, especially at the beginning, about Dr. Cousteau’s ridiculous insistence on killing his majestic extraterrestrial obsession. The end of the novel partly redeems this thread of the story by making it all more mystical and complicated and beautiful; I wasn’t entirely convinced Cousteau had ever intended the vacuum leviathan’s death. But still.
In true Melvillian fashion—shades of that other unwieldy masterpiece Mardi—our heroes travel from planet to planet, meeting the colonists and learning about the various creatures they research, sentient poisonous crabs and the like. Here lay the one flaw in the world-building I just couldn’t stop seeing: how isolated are these colonies? On the one hand, video calls home from deep space are routine. On the other hand, no one seems to have any idea what is going on anywhere. Either you can video call your Earth boyfriend or no one can have any idea what’s going on in the space colonies. But like—it can’t be both?
I got over this maddening inconsistency because the planet-side sojourns were just so fun. There’s something uniquely special about episodic science fiction. The Uncontinented Stars drive boldly forth into the obvious middle ground between nineteenth-century travel narratives and Star Wars. Each planet the crew visits is more interesting than the last, culminating in a crazy mushroom planet that infects everyone’s brains and imprints them with a kind of cosmic conspiracy, of which the great white space whale at the end of the universe is somehow a part.
And in true Melvillian fashion, the novel gets better and better as it goes. One at a time, the cast of scientists go from basic buddies-in-space archetypes to surprisingly intimate character portraits. Noah goes from maddening, albeit in a very neuro-atypical, doctoral-candidate kind of way, to maddening in a thoughtful, touching (neuro-atypical, doctoral-candidate) way.
Noah’s father is obsessed with ancient American history—meaning the good old US of A, a country that no longer exists, on a continent that has actually decolonized, so that people use Indigenous names for former American cities and study Iroquoian in school. What at first seems like a clever but shallow bit of leftist wish-fulfillment slowly comes to echo the way contemporary politics—and contemporary colonialism, whether seen or unseen≈inflect family life for queer and trans people.
The end of Moby Dick is one of the most glorious things ever written in English. The end of The Uncontinented Stars is not that, obviously. But it is beautiful and surprising and just plain good science fiction. Highly recommended—for that elusive target audience, at least.
This review is also posted (actually in slightly abridged form, since this review is way too long) on my substack at: https://scorpionreview.substack.com/p...
The Uncontinented Stars was nominated for a 2026 Lambda in Trans Fiction. It stands out amongst the other nominees for being self-published, for having only six ratings on Goodreads, and for being a space opera retelling of Moby Dick.
This is a book for a very particular audience: do you love Moby Dick? Do you love long, involved space operas filled with rich xenobiological analysis? Are you interested in subtle, intimate explorations of queer memory and far-future anti-colonial politics?
It’s been over ten years since I read Moby Dick—a fact I’m taking as a personal attack by the universe. Where have the years gone? How am I supposed to read Moby Dick again when I have so many other books to read? How am I supposed to live my life without remembering Moby Dick clearly enough even to properly review a queer scifi retelling? When I read Moby Dick (just a few years ago, when I was absolutely just as young as I still am because I am young and that’s how time works), I loved it. I hadn’t for a moment expected such pure, unadulterated literary pleasure, one glorious beautiful funny unfolding sentence after another. It’s a truly foolish book to try and retell. And yet, what is art for if not the foolhardy pursuit of the impossible?
It is the distant future. Earth is post-climate catastrophe. The nation-state is no more. The stars are colonized. And academic science has not changed one bit. The doctoral program has apparently proved the single most enduring creation of nineteenth-century humanity. Our narrator Noah Starbuck is a young xenozoologist. His dissertation topic: the legendary, totally theoretical “vacuum leviathan.” Starbuck’s doctoral advisor was the infamous Captain Ahab—whoops, I mean Dr. Abelard Cousteau—who vanished in deep space five years ago. The story kicks off when Cousteau’s body is recovered, and his mind uploaded into a robot. (The radical implications of this technology are under-explored, though I suppose it’s not exactly that kind of science fiction; we’re somewhere in the mushy middle-ground between space fantasy and hard scifi—a place I quite like, actually.)
Newly robotic Dr. Ahab—I mean Cousteau—assembles a crew of xenobiologists to visit some of Earth’s most isolated research colonies, where xenobiology’s greatest minds research alien ecosystems in situ. Spoiler alert—Cousteau’s actually on the hunt for the very vacuum leviathan that attacked his ship and destroyed his body. Noah Starbuck’s role on the crew: to manage his erstwhile advisor and interpret his inexplicable behavior for the others. Academics will be triggered.
Like Captain Ahab, Dr. Cousteau intends to kill his whale. Here, I think, Moby Dick’s influence led Haden Cross a little astray. Whalers kill whales, obviously. Scientists study whales. No one was confused or distressed enough, especially at the beginning, about Dr. Cousteau’s ridiculous insistence on killing his majestic extraterrestrial obsession. The end of the novel partly redeems this thread of the story by making it all more mystical and complicated and beautiful; I wasn’t entirely convinced Cousteau had ever intended the vacuum leviathan’s death. But still.
In true Melvillian fashion—shades of that other unwieldy masterpiece Mardi—our heroes travel from planet to planet, meeting the colonists and learning about the various creatures they research, sentient poisonous crabs and the like. Here lay the one flaw in the world-building I just couldn’t stop seeing: how isolated are these colonies? On the one hand, video calls home from deep space are routine. On the other hand, no one seems to have any idea what is going on anywhere. Either you can video call your Earth boyfriend or no one can have any idea what’s going on in the space colonies. But like—it can’t be both?
I got over this maddening inconsistency because the planet-side sojourns were just so fun. There’s something uniquely special about episodic science fiction. The Uncontinented Stars drive boldly forth into the obvious middle ground between nineteenth-century travel narratives and Star Wars. Each planet the crew visits is more interesting than the last, culminating in a crazy mushroom planet that infects everyone’s brains and imprints them with a kind of cosmic conspiracy, of which the great white space whale at the end of the universe is somehow a part.
And in true Melvillian fashion, the novel gets better and better as it goes. One at a time, the cast of scientists go from basic buddies-in-space archetypes to surprisingly intimate character portraits. Noah goes from maddening, albeit in a very neuro-atypical, doctoral-candidate kind of way, to maddening in a thoughtful, touching (neuro-atypical, doctoral-candidate) way.
Noah’s father is obsessed with ancient American history—meaning the good old US of A, a country that no longer exists, on a continent that has actually decolonized, so that people use Indigenous names for former American cities and study Iroquoian in school. What at first seems like a clever but shallow bit of leftist wish-fulfillment slowly comes to echo the way contemporary politics—and contemporary colonialism, whether seen or unseen≈inflect family life for queer and trans people.
The end of Moby Dick is one of the most glorious things ever written in English. The end of The Uncontinented Stars is not that, obviously. But it is beautiful and surprising and just plain good science fiction. Highly recommended—for that elusive target audience, at least.
This review is also posted (actually in slightly abridged form, since this review is way too long) on my substack at: https://scorpionreview.substack.com/p...
July 8, 2026
It’s giving… this book wasn’t proofread. It’s giving… this book wasn’t copyedited. It’s giving… this book wasn’t edited even beyond a first draft. Every scene is 500 times more overwritten than it needs to be; countless words are jumbled into meaningless phrases that made the prose borderline incomprehensible at times; pacing, stakes, and character arcs nonexistent; there are so many themes than none of them progress beyond surface-level; and the plot—that is, the pathetic efforts of the crew failing to stop the virus-infected captain of the ship—was so contrived that this almost read like a shlocky horror story where every character makes the most stupid decision ever instead of the most logical one. There is only so much “the characters go to a place, do nothing, and then leave without finding anything out or accomplishing anything” I can take before I’m blowing up a book with my mind. The Uncontinented Stars reads as though Cross has no interest in sci-fi, which is crazy because their entire writing background as far as I can tell is in sci-fi, but the “science-y” parts of this book are vague and insipid, making the worldbuilding so confusing and conflicting that it becomes impossible to solidly grasp the rules of the story’s universe. There is effort to comment on decolonialism, but it’s again so vague and disconnected from any sociopolitical worldbuilding that it feels like the author has never meaningfully engaged with any critical theory about colonialism. I don’t understand why the author bothers writing in this genre or about these themes if they’re not going to bother doing research. If you want good queer sci-fi, read Becky Chambers, especially To Be Taught, If Fortunate and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. This one is giving vegan/spiritual cult vibes.
July 25, 2025
Fantastic retelling of Moby Dick.
The good— the sci-fi worldbuilding is really good. The author doesn’t spoon-feed you explanations but lets the setting shape through anecdotes and dialogue. It feels realistic! The obvious Moby-Dick analogues are generally well-adapted and the rest of the ensemble are interesting and very concrete. Specifically, Esmail Rostami stands out as one of the best Ishmael adaptations I’ve read, and Savannah’s character and relationship to Noah feels very lived-in. The ConBod storyline started out as a cool way to explore how disability and bodily autonomy will be handled in the centuries to come, and ended up as one of my favorite sci-fi plots in recent memory. The FDL reveal was kind of everything to me, and on that note, a lot of the Moby-Dick plot points and references felt natural to the story. In the last few chapters this devolved into a kind of slow horror, which feels true to the original.
The less good— I really wanted more to Abelard and Noah’s relationship. The POV shift from Ishmael to Starbuck was probably so that the author could explore the relationship between Starbuck and Ahab, but it felt like we got a lot more development of Noah and every other character first. Sometimes it felt like the author forgot the Ahab of it all and was too locked in on other aspects of the sci-fi story, which I’m not exactly complaining about, but means that making this a retelling specifically from Starbuck’s perspective doesn’t do much.
As a retelling of Moby-Dick it has some really strong points that other retellings have missed, and the setting is fantastic. However, it is set up to be an exploration of the relationship between Abelard and Noah, and falls short with this. I do recommend it despite that.
The good— the sci-fi worldbuilding is really good. The author doesn’t spoon-feed you explanations but lets the setting shape through anecdotes and dialogue. It feels realistic! The obvious Moby-Dick analogues are generally well-adapted and the rest of the ensemble are interesting and very concrete. Specifically, Esmail Rostami stands out as one of the best Ishmael adaptations I’ve read, and Savannah’s character and relationship to Noah feels very lived-in. The ConBod storyline started out as a cool way to explore how disability and bodily autonomy will be handled in the centuries to come, and ended up as one of my favorite sci-fi plots in recent memory. The FDL reveal was kind of everything to me, and on that note, a lot of the Moby-Dick plot points and references felt natural to the story. In the last few chapters this devolved into a kind of slow horror, which feels true to the original.
The less good— I really wanted more to Abelard and Noah’s relationship. The POV shift from Ishmael to Starbuck was probably so that the author could explore the relationship between Starbuck and Ahab, but it felt like we got a lot more development of Noah and every other character first. Sometimes it felt like the author forgot the Ahab of it all and was too locked in on other aspects of the sci-fi story, which I’m not exactly complaining about, but means that making this a retelling specifically from Starbuck’s perspective doesn’t do much.
As a retelling of Moby-Dick it has some really strong points that other retellings have missed, and the setting is fantastic. However, it is set up to be an exploration of the relationship between Abelard and Noah, and falls short with this. I do recommend it despite that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 13, 2026
4.5, rounded up for GR. This was a great sci-fi / psychological thriller about a descent into madness, and more people need to read it. It's been 14 years since I read Moby Dick, and I probably would have liked this retelling even more if I'd read the classic more recently, since I only recognized some of the references. However, I don't think you to have read Moby Dick to enjoy this book, since it was just a good book! The author does a great job of immersing you in a scene, bringing to life the various planets the crew travels to, and in particular the small ship they spend so much time on. They've made the crew into a bunch of believable, complex, and empathetic characters. This really helps draw the reader in as events turn darker as the plot unfolds. It's also got some solid sci-fi, dealing with issues of artificial bodies, the ethics of recognizing sentience and intelligence in alien species. It also presents a queer-normative world and some great trans rep with a trans masc main character. My only complaint is that it may be a tad too long, but I think that may be a requirement for a Moby Dick retelling? I hope that this author keeps writing, because this debut was great!
November 28, 2025
i lowkey don't know what i was on, but this book felt so hard to finish. The writing felt so choppy and the characters were so confusing. Haven't read moby dick (though i've read things about it) and it felt like you kinda have to? It was just very weirdly lacking a lot as a standalone book.
February 9, 2026
As a fan of the original novel, and particularly as someone who has consumed and formed opinions on various adaptations, I had high expectations for this novel- expectations that it certainly met. The Uncontinented Stars is a work that has a great respect for its source material, while also adding brilliant commentary of its own.
The characters are certainly the heart of this story. The Starbuck analogue, Noah, makes for a realistic and yet still endearing protagonist, who you simultaneously want to shake some sense into while cheering him on. Starbuck is actually my favorite character from the original novel, so I was so delighted to find out about a story where his analogue was the POV character. The progression of his relationship with the Ahab analogue, Abelard, is a highlight of the novel, and as someone who has always loved their analogues' storyline, it was also wonderful to see done well. Besides them, the rest of the crew are a very loveable bunch. You'll stick with them throughout the story- what else do you expect from a team of people in a spaceship together?- and in that amount of time, all of them present something that makes you attach yourself to them.
I believe this is a book that can be enjoyed whether or not you're a fan of the original novel. Having previous knowledge is great for catching various references and analogous scenes, but even without it, the story is compelling enough on its own that one would be able to enjoy it just as much.
The characters are certainly the heart of this story. The Starbuck analogue, Noah, makes for a realistic and yet still endearing protagonist, who you simultaneously want to shake some sense into while cheering him on. Starbuck is actually my favorite character from the original novel, so I was so delighted to find out about a story where his analogue was the POV character. The progression of his relationship with the Ahab analogue, Abelard, is a highlight of the novel, and as someone who has always loved their analogues' storyline, it was also wonderful to see done well. Besides them, the rest of the crew are a very loveable bunch. You'll stick with them throughout the story- what else do you expect from a team of people in a spaceship together?- and in that amount of time, all of them present something that makes you attach yourself to them.
I believe this is a book that can be enjoyed whether or not you're a fan of the original novel. Having previous knowledge is great for catching various references and analogous scenes, but even without it, the story is compelling enough on its own that one would be able to enjoy it just as much.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews