Preceding the supernatural intensity that haunts Moby-Dick, Melville's first novel of anything like direct sf interest is Mardi: And a Voyage Thither ( 1849 3vols). Though the book's influence has normally been implicit, it has been specifically homaged, as in Roger Zelazny's 'The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth' (March 1965 F&SF) less seriously in Philip José Farmer's Sequel by Other Hands, The Wind Whales of Ishmael ( 1971) in Bruce Sterling's Involution Ocean ( 1977) in China Miéville's RailSea ( 2012) and in Brian Evenson's 'Leg' (in The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell coll 2021), where a sentient leg drives its owner through 'the currents of space' in search of something that will almost certainly sink his Starship.

The echoes of Ray Bradbury's screenplay for the film Moby Dick ( 1956) directed by John Huston (1906-1987) were detectable throughout his career, climaxing in the Space Opera novella Leviathan '99 ( 2007). Melville's blending in Moby-Dick of rational explanation, romantic sublimity, and the inexplicable was later to become typical of sf, and like all his greater work has served as a model for Equipoisal ventures into the water margins where genres touch. He is of course best known for such radically symbolic novels as The Whale ( 1851 3vols vt Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale 1851 2vols) the great whale of this novel has long served as an archetype for the more Metaphysical variety of sf Monster, his tormented and tormenting pursuer Captain Ahab as an almost demonic Antihero, and the whaling ship Pequod as an illuminated Ship of Fools. (1819-1891) US author whose first professional publication, 'Fragments from a Writing Desk' (4- Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser), is an exercise in Gothic grotesquerie.

The Happy Failure by Herman Melville