Two Moby Dick Related Stories

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Given the title of this blog, it should come as no surprise that Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. A recent re-reading gave rise to the fanciful question … what if Ahab, too, survived the sinking of the Pequod?

These two short stories of mine offer somewhat different answers to that question.

… Cold Calculus published in Sudden Flash Magazine and,

… The Last Harpoon which may be found in After/Thought Literary Journal.

From the department of somewhat unrelated: On my recent romp through the novel, I was particularly struck by Melville’s assertion in Chapter 105 (over and against those arguing even then that the mighty leviathan might face extinction) that the whale will persist. He was wrong and right at one and the same time; he could not have predicted the slaughter unleashed by industrial strength commercial whaling in the twentieth-century. No more likely was he to have envisioned the herculean effort required to halt those practices and reverse their effects. 

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