Gregory Feeley is author of The Oxygen Barons (1990), Kentauros (2010), and many novellas and short stories published in magazines or anthologies, including “Aweary of the Sun” (1994) ; “The Weighing of Ayre” in Starlight 1 (1996) ; “Fancy Bread” (2005) ; and “The Unpastured Sea” (2023). His work often engages incidents of cultural and technological change. We have known each other for many years through our shared interest in the writings of Avram Davidson. In 2005 I published his short novel of coffee and ideas in early seventeenth-century Venice, Arabian Wine. A recent work, Th’Erratic Stars (2022) is an extract from his novel « Hamlet the Magician ».
Henry Wessells : Allusions to Shakespeare and his writings run deep throughout your work, including several novellas and your novel Hamlet the Magician. Can you point to a specific line or passage in the Plays and say, “It all started here” ?
Gregory Feeley : I think it must have been sometime around the age of 10 or 11, when I first saw a production of Macbeth and heard Macbeth declare that “Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” I recognized “Night’s Black Agents” as the title of a collection by Fritz Leiber (I was at that time much better read in science fiction than in Shakespeare) and immediately Got It : you could take an especially good phrase from Shakespeare — or anyone else — and appropriate it for a story title ! This seemed such a wonderful thing that when I began reading what Terry Southern called Quality Lit a few years later and noticed how common the practice was, I knew that I could do this myself if I liked.
Macbeth has been heavily picked over, and I suspect I got the last good one. But I notice that Hamlet still has (at least) one left, and am surprised that no one has nabbed “A Crafty Madness”. It’s available for whoever wants it.