Gregory Feeley

US critic and author whose essays and book reviews have appeared from the 1980s in various journals from the Washington Post to Foundation. Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material; not always justly, he has been accused of a tendency to hector. Although he began publishing sf with "The Light at the End of the Penumbra" in Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977) edited by David Gerrold, Feeley did not become active as an author of fiction for about a decade. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons (1990), served therefore as a sort of debut, surprising some by turning out to be a Hard-SF tale of a terraformed Moon (see Terraforming). In what seems a perfectly standard fashion, colonists and a giant corporation are at loggerheads; it is only the labyrinth of the plot that exposes the novel as other than orthodox. His second novel, Arabian Wine (2005), is an Alternate History set in a Venice, unusually (for sf) devoted to failures: both the attempt to introduce coffee, and to build a successful steam engine, fail to connect to the new mercantile and scientific world aborning--so these hints of a different history are aborted. Kentauros (2010 chap) is a meditation, part fiction part essay, on the theme of exile or exclusion, based on Kentauros, the outcast "Monster" who gave birth to the race of centaurs, themselves deemed unnatural (see Supernatural Creatures).