Review | The Wind Whales of Ishmael by Philip Jose Farmer

Even if you’ve never read it, almost every reader know the story of Moby-Dick. Opening with “Call me Ishmael[,]” Hermann Melville‘s novel is the tale of the white whale and obsessed Captain Ahab’s quest to kill it, a hunt that does not end well for anyone. Only Ishmael, the narrator, survives to put the story down, drifting on the coffin of his bunk-mate Queequeg.

And that’s where Philip Jose Farmer‘s The Wind Whales of Ishmael. As he floats adrift, Ishmael finds himself falling out of our time and into the future, the far future, landing adrift in a future Earth dramatically different from our own. The oceans have nearly evaporated, life has evolved to the air, and man survives in air balloons hunting the leviathans of the air.

The Wind Whales of Ishmael is an intriguing and fun story, if a bit dated. I recently read Edgar Rice Burrough‘s A Princess of Mars, and I couldn’t help but hear echoes of John Carter in the Farmer’s Ishmael. He arrives in a strange and foreign world, is saved, and saves, a beautiful princess, and soon rises to prominence using his specialized knowledge and skills. The tale is short and exciting, the plot creative and the setting strange and exotic. Ishmael is an every man, a hero that survives and thrive a hundred thousand years in the future.

First published in 1971, Titan Books has put out a new edition of The Wind Whales of Ishmael with a foreword by Michael Croteau and an afterword by Danny Adams.

Buy The Wind Whales of Ishmael from Amazon.

Attack of the Books! is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter W (as in The Wind Whales of Ishmael).