Birthday Review: Stories of Gregory Feeley

Greg Feeley turns 64 today. He is one of the best and most intelligent SF writers working today, though alas not as prolific as some of us might hope. He is also an incisive and unsparing critic. I say "SF writer", and that is surely true (and Greg strongly identifies as part of the SF community), but, as you will see me say in the reviews I've published below, much of his work is not really SF, or ambiguously so. This is not in the least a problem -- an SFnal imagination surely informs the historical works I've discussed, and, in any case, for me and many other readers, what matters most is the work, and the work should be in the best form or genre for itself. I read widely outside SF, though SF is the core of my reading, and SF is what lights me up even when it's bad, but Greg's writing (critical as well as fictional) is a demonstration that the field of literature is wide, and that we should not be building walls but welcoming great work from wherever it comes, genre-wise or culture-wise.

Some of my favorite Feeley stories date to before I was reviewing for Locus. I think I may have reviewed some of these for Tangent, but it looks like I've lost my original electronic copies of everything I wrote for Tangent, which at this remove seems a terrible loss to me. (It didn't even occur to me, decades ago, that I would want to keep them.) Anyway, as for Greg's stories, the likes of "The Drowning Cell", "The Weighing of Ayre", and "Animae Celestes" (among others) are not to be missed.

Locus Online, 12 April 2001

[This is extracted from a longer piece I did for Locus Online called Two Fine Novellas From Less Travelled Places, which also reviewed Paul di Filippo's "Karuna, Inc.", and in which is discussed the market for novellas -- a discussion which is terribly out of date by now.]

"Spirit of the Place", by Gregory Feeley, is an impressive fantasy novella based on an historical incident, indeed, an incident which is still generating controversy and political maneuvering to this day. The story is set in Greece in 1802, as the ship Mentor, owned by the Scottish Lord Elgin, takes on a number of crates containing marble friezes and metopes removed from the Parthenon. These are the so-called "Elgin marbles," which after much debate were sold to the British Museum by Elgin, and which remain there today, despite many appeals that they be returned to Greece.

This story is told through Elgin's personal secretary, William Richard Hamilton. He is to accompany the marbles to England on the Mentor. Once the ship is underway, there are murmurs among the crew of whispers and strange noises from the hold. Hamilton ventures down, and encounters something very strange indeed, a "spirit" resident somehow in the ash planks which were just used to repair the Mentor. The rest of the story recounts Hamilton's relationship with this spirit.

The story is well-told, bolstered with careful historical details, and with careful references to the literary and mythological history of nymphs and dryads. Hamilton's relationship with this "person", as he is compelled to call her, is ambiguous and somewhat painful. His character and the spirit's character are well-depicted, and the resolution takes part of the Mentor's actual history and portrays it in a new light. The story itself is only indirectly about the Elgin marbles, but its depiction of the pain of the nymph of the ash tree at her uprooting is a fine metaphorical version of the cruel removal of the great sculptures in the Parthenon from their rightful home. As with much of Feeley's work, the action of his story becomes a sort of metaphor for the thematic matter of the piece. This is excellent work, and I hope it comes to the attention of SF readers.

Locus, January 2003

Beyond the Last Star, edited by Sherwood Smith, concerns what might lie "beyond" the end of the universe. All in all it's a pretty decent book, though the repetitive nature of many of the stories does pall a bit. Gregory Feeley opens the book very strongly, with possibly the best story, "False Vacuum", initially, and intriguingly enough, about a far future Muslim Earth, in which non-Muslims have all left as machine intelligences. A young woman encounters some of these intelligences, and learns a bit of their nature -- and then the story shifts gears, to put a different focus on things.

Locus, April 2004

Perhaps the best story in The First Heroes is Gregory Feeley's "Giliad", a very good post-9/11 reflection. It is barely SF or not SF at all, nor even historical fiction, but it still occupies the same imaginative space, it seems to me. The narrative intertwines several points-of-view, mainly that of Leslie, a contemporary woman in the fall of 2001. Her husband is beta-testing a new computer game, Ziggurat, a sort of Civilization variant set in Bronze Age Sumer. Leslie studies Sumer, and dreams of a Sumerian girl faced with war at the beginning of history. Meanwhile, at the time Francis Fukuyama fatuously called "the end of history", history advances quite brutally -- at the World Trade Center, in Afghanistan, and of course in Iraq, collocated with Sumer. There is a brief interval showing an SF writer (unnamed but recognizable as James Blish) worrying about another possible "end of history" in the Bomb-haunted 50s. An absorbing and thoughtful novella.

Locus, May 2004

Gregory Feeley seems determined to make things hard on SF award nominators: "Arabian Wine" (Asimov's, April-May) is his second outstanding novella to appear in an SF venue this year, but like "Giliad" (from The First Heroes) it is not really SF. "Arabian Wine" is a long novella (cut from a short novel) concerning Matteo, younger son of a Venetian merchant family in the early 17th Century. He has encountered the invigorating properties of a drink called "caofa", and he hopes to make it popular in Europe, and thereby make a fortune for his family, and perhaps also to revivify Venice itself. He is also involved with a young man working on a steam engine. And his mistress is engaging in small-time witchcraft on the side. Any or all of these activities might engage the unwelcome attention of various Venetian authorities. This is an absorbing tale set in an unfamiliar milieu, and dealing with the introduction of new technology -- SFnal enough, eh? In the end though it is mainly, and movingly, about a man ground in the gears of the apparatus of an autocratic state, about the impact of Islam on the West, and about coffee.

Review of Arabian Wine, from the March 2005 Locus

Gregory Feeley's "Arabian Wine", published in Asimov's last April-May, was one of the most celebrated stories of the year. I thought it perhaps the best novella of 2004 (with only another Feeley story, "Giliad", to challenge it). It is on the preliminary Nebula ballot as I write. And now a longer version appears in a lovely edition from the small press Temporary Culture.

The novella was, in fact, cut by Feeley to fit the length restrictions of the magazine. Thus the new version is really the original version of the story, and indeed the preferred version. It is nearly half again as long, at roughly 40,000 words on the borderline between novella and novel. The novella is an excellent work, but the novel is better, a fuller and richer story, recounting for the most part the same events but with elaborations both at the micro level (a line here and there) and the macro level (not so much new scenes as expanded scenes). There are significant additions – considerably more detail of the protagonist's time in Alexandria, an instructive encounter with a young boy in the Arsenal, more interactions with his not always fully supportive family. But perhaps more importantly there are lines and paragraphs which make the narrative richer, more detailed, throughout. Pace is not an issue – the story unfolds just as it should at the greater length.

The central character is Matteo Benveneto, a younger son of a Venetian trading family. He is unable to travel for the family because he is subject to severe seasickness. But on his only journey he was introduced to coffee – kahveh, caofa, "Arabian Wine". Back in Venice he pursues two projects. He hopes to introduce coffee to the European palate and establish his family as a leading distributor. And he is assisting his friend, Gaspare Treviso, in developing a steam engine for the potential use of the Venetian state. This is all against the backdrop of a stagnating Venice, in about the year 1600.

These projects are promising. The steam engine, designed to pump water out of the basements of buildings (certainly an issue in Venice!), is technically challenging but appears to work. And coffee is a hit with most of the people who try it. But there are political and cultural issues. Matteo deals with much of Venetian society, one way or another: a Senator; a representative of the Jewish ghetto; the deeply conservative artisans of the shipbuilding sector, the Arsenal; his own skeptical family; even his fortune-telling mistress. In the end he is ground, like his coffee beans, in the machinery of the authoritarian state: suspicious of change, riven by factions, unwilling to confront the reality of an altered political and cultural landscape. Matteo's fate is almost random, contingent upon the whims of those in power and the whims of simple fate.

This is not unambiguously SF. There are elements that may be speculative – most notably the fairly early efforts to build a steam engine – but nothing that violates what I know of history (unless an early scene amusingly hinting at the invention of espresso qualifies!). Nonetheless, the novel (as to be sure with much historical fiction) satisfies in an SFnal fashion. It is in part about the introduction of new technology to a society – surely a deeply science-fictional theme. It is also a depiction of an unfamiliar culture – again an SFnal theme. It is also of course relevant to contemporary concerns – for one thing it deals with the clash of Islam and the West; for another it deals with the wielding of autocratic power, all but uncaringly, against insignificant individuals. No matter the genre – "Arabian Wine" was one of the best novellas of 2004, and Arabian Wine will surely stand as one of the best novels of 2005.

Locus, February 2006

Jay Lake’s anthology TEL: Stories consists of 29 stories of an “experimental” nature. Many of these are interesting but not quite successful, but the best are quite good, particularly the opening story, Greer Gilman’s “Jack Daw’s Pack” (a reprint), and the closing story, Gregory Feeley’s “Fancy Bread”, is which the long life of Jack (of Beanstalk fame, it seems), and his ongoing struggle for bread, is a means of depicting, of all things, economic history – from a rather slant perspective.

Locus, November 2008

Otherworldly Maine is a fine collection of fantastical stories set in Maine, mixing reprints with originals. The reprints come from such storied writers as Mark Twain, Edgar Pangborn, and Stephen King, as well as some less well known people, and they are a fine diverse selection. The new stories are also good – the best is “Awskonomuk”, by Gregory Feeley (a writer we haven’t seen enough from lately). It’s not really SF or Fantasy, though its concerns are SFnal – a hobbyist archaeologist, interested in the possibility that Leif Ericson’s people got as far south as Maine, inquires into the history of an Abenaki woman whose DNA suggests a snippet of European ancestry. The fulcrum, in this villainless story, is the question of where the interests of First Nations people really lie – this woman, at least, cares much more about the future than a perhaps ambiguous past.

Locus, February 2011

Finally, I was glad to see new fiction from Gregory Feeley, though Kentauros is more than just fiction: it’s a beautifully written linked set of three essays and two short stories (one of them in two parts), all on the subject of Kentauros, the unfortunate son of a human king who dared to lust after the goddess Hera, and who was tricked into sleeping with a cloud simulacrum of her instead, engendering Kentauros, who in time would rape some horses, engendering the race of centaurs. The essays discuss that rather obscure bit of Greek mythology. One story tells of Kentauros’ difficult life, and the other is about Mary Shelley, and her relationship with Lord Byron and with Leigh Hunt, as she raises her son after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death. The Kentauros story comes up, but more central is Mary’s own life, her own genius, and her recollections of her husband, and a supposed poetic version of the Kentauros myth that Hunt suggest Shelley may have written. The book is fascinating in a scholarly sense, and also in a literary sense, and it is simply lovely as well.

Locus, November 2016

Even better, I thought, was Gregory Feeley’s “The Bridge of Dreams” (Clarkesworld, April), set in the very far future with a Norse-derived theme (I was reminded, a bit, of Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry”, not necessarily because of any direct similarities.) Heimdallr is a being living alone and maintaining an ice bridge between Plouton and Charon that he calls Bifröst, when a visitor, Garðrofa arrives with a summons from the Sheltered Gardens in the “Sunlit Realms” – the Inner Solar System – where the two, become one, will encounter the remnants of humanity, and people called kobolds, and a task that may involve treachery … It’s a mysterious story, redolent with convincingly weird posthuman details, effectively stranged by such devices as naming the planets recognizably but unusually. There is wildly high technology, and a certain elegiac tone, an elegant and careful prose, and some just cool ideas.