Moby-Dick


 * "...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

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. 

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!"

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. 

When Qatai invited The Doctor to join him on his quest to destroy the telepathic pitcher plant in 2375, The Doctor replied, "My Ishmael to your Ahab?"

Tom Paris was fond of Moby-Dick when he was a child. 

Background

 * In addition to First Contact, the original series episodes and  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.