Moby Dick

A copy of Moby Dick found aboard the SS Botany Bay.

"...To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."

- Moby Dick, quoted by Khan Noonien Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

Moby Dick is a novel by American author Herman Melville, published in 1851 on Earth. The story describes Captain Ahab's obsessive quest to hunt down the eponymous white sperm whale that had maimed him years earlier. In the end, Ahab's thirst for vengeance destroyed both him and his ship.

In 1986, a tour goer in one of Doctor Gillian Taylor's tours at the Cetacean Institute asked her if whales attacked people like in Moby Dick, leading Dr. Taylor to explain that they did not, because most whales didn't have teeth. (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

During his exile on Ceti Alpha V, Khan Noonien Singh read Moby Dick as he became immersed in his own desire for revenge on James T. Kirk. During his search and battle with Kirk, he quoted lines from the novel. While some are direct quotes (such as the line above), some were modified from the original. For example, Khan's stated "I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!" (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

The original, from the novel's thirty-sixth chapter, is "I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up!" Some thematic elements from the movie were borrowed from the plot of Moby Dick, including Khan's relentless pursuit of Kirk which ultimately results in his own death and the loss of his ship.

Its cultural significance was such that the story was well-known to most people on Earth regardless of their literary knowledge. In 2063, Lily Sloane compared Jean-Luc Picard's hatred for the Borg to Ahab's desire to destroy the white whale when he insisted on fighting them rather than destroying the Enterprise and the Borg along with it, sending Picard into such a rage that he destroyed the display of Enterprise's past in the ship's observation lounge - but when the captain, realizing she was absolutely right, paraphrased a verse from the forty-first chapter, ("And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.") Sloane, clearly unfamiliar with the words, admitted she had never actually read the book. (Star Trek: First Contact)

The original is "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

When Qatai invited The Doctor to join him on his quest to destroy the telepathic pitcher plant in 2375, The Doctor replied, "My Ishamel to your Ahab?" (VOY: "Bliss")

Tom Paris was fond of Moby Dick when he was a child. (VOY: "Thirty Days")

Background

• In addition to First Contact, the original series episodes "The Doomsday Machine" and "Obsession" were also loosely based on the story of Moby Dick.
• Patrick Stewart played Captain Ahab in a 1998 made-for-TV adaptation of the novel.
• The actual title for the book as originally released is Moby-Dick.

External links

• Moby-Dick at Wikipedia
• ISBN 0393972836 - search for Moby-Dick at external book sources
• Power Moby-Dick, full text of the book online with annotations