The Wind Whales of Ishmael

© 1971, by Philip Jose Farmer

Ever read Moby Dick? I did, once, twelve years ago. For me, it was kinda like why some people climb Mount Everest. Took me a solid two months, and I learned all I ever wanted to know and more about whales and whaling. Oh, yeah, and a guy with a peg-leg full of issues who winds up destroying everything and everyone around him.

Philip Jose Farmer read Moby Dick, too, and when PJF reads a classic, something in his mind clicks and sends this message to his brain: What would it be like if I contributed in some way to this great work? Sometimes he gets permission to write follow-up novels with the original characters. Other times he writes peripheral novels focusing on some aspect of the classic work, like the city of Opar in his Hadon books. In this instance, he decided to write a sequel of sorts. The Wind Whales of Ishmael is the result.

My verdict? I’ve read it twice, once about a decade ago, and now again in the midst of my Farmer craze. Both times were fast reads, three hours spread over four days in each case. And both times I came away with this major take: how effortless is this man’s ability to create a lush, detailed, well-developed, and deadly dangerous new world!

The book begins where Melville leaves off: the Pequod has sunk, leaving poor Ishmael afloat Queequeg’s engraved coffin. He’s picked up by a passing vessel, is allowed to sleep for 36 hours, and is put to work as lookout on the main mast to earn his keep. But man is this guy unlucky. For what happens his very first night on watch but some strange St. Elmo’s display causing the very waters the ship is sailing upon to vanish!

Ishmael plummets for – literally – miles, and is only saved by smashing through something slimy and organic, and then tumbling into thick vegetation. His new ship crashes to pieces in the shallow waters beyond. By page 20 or so, our hero has deduced (based on a fat red sun and a gigantic, swift-moving moon), that he has gone forward through time millions of years to a future Earth, where the most of the ocean has boiled away. The plush island he finds himself on is on the bottom of what he once called the Pacific.

But that’s the least of his troubles. The vegetation has an aggressively symbiotic relationship to the weird varieties of life he spots. You eat a leaf, then the leaf sedates you, inserts a sharp vine, and drinks some of you. It’s the deal you gotta make unless you wish to die of thirst. There are also hybrid monkey-like critters and foot-long roaches, but the worse things are the things that fly in the air.

Evolution has given future Earthlife lighter-than-air bladders to float – often at great speeds – creating a highly-structured food chain in the air. Massive clouds of blood-red plankton drift in the clouds, harvested by the massive wind whales, who are, in turn, harvested by cylindrical “air sharks” – hollow tubes with teeth, basically. And harvesting them all, at great risk, are the men of this world, who practice their whaling in great airships sailing giant bladders on the swift jetstream currents miles above the ground.

As luck would have it (we literary types call it deus ex machina), Ishmael is found by Namalee, a princess / priestess from the local city-state of Zalarapamtra. She nurses Ish back to health and manages to teach him her language in an incredibly fast few days, guaranteeing her a job at the Pimsleur School of Languages should she ever go back in time a million years. Then they view a whale hunt and the disastrous results that sometimes follow. What crewmen survive inform them that their home city has been destroyed – by the Purple Beast of Stinging Death (that’s a translation, by the way), led there treacherously by ships from rival town Booragangah.

Now, it may sound silly (it certainly sounds silly to me writing this), but … it works. You’re pulled into the tale from the early pages and you have trouble putting the darn thing down. Like all PJF, it’s lean and mean, fast-paced, and quite brutal at times. Characters come into the story fully-fleshed-out, only to give up the ghost a few pages later. Like Two Hawks from my previous Farmer read, and sort of like Hadon from Flight to Opar, Ishmael is a fish-out-of-water that has to survive in an intensely violent world by his wits and, more often than not, his fists. And in the end he manages to surprise everyone, most of all himself.

As far as the whole “sequel to Moby Dick” business, it ain’t. PJF didn’t even make an effort to write stylistically like Melville, though I doubt that was even in his design. The wind whales are only passers-by in the story and don’t have the integral role you might have expected. Indeed, the “Purple Beast” is the nemesis, the big baddie, and it’s more like the giant squid Captain Nemo fought (and I believe Ishmael refers to it as “the kraken”). And the final third of the novel deals with the Zalarapamtran revenge upon Booragangah.

But it does appear to be quintessential PJF, so I like.

Grade: B+

Note: This book has one unique feature that puzzled me – it doesn’t contain any chapter divisions! My paperback has 152 pages, and from the very first page to the very last page, there is but one single-line break in the story, and that’s not denoted in any special way. Just struck me as odd. I don’t recall ever reading a book (Wind Whales is probably 60,000-75,000 words in length) without any internal division.