Cumberworld and Farther

Three stories by Gregory Feeley-a short story, a novelette, and a novella-that explore different regions of the premodern world (no longer in medieval but far short of "Enlightenment") as it undergoes the transition from familiar models of the universe to profoundly impersonal and disquieting new perspectives.

In "Th'Erratic Stars," a captive prince, sold into slavery by Muslim corsairs, tries to employ his knowledge of magia naturalis to free himself from a lifetime of servitude in the library of a wealthy Ottoman bureaucrat. "Cumberworld" follows the uncertain fortunes of a bastard child (begotten, his mother claimed, by Robin Goodfellow) across the landscape of a pre-industrial England that, while still predominantly rural, has begun to taste the enormous profits of the maritime slave trade. And in "Isle of Cloves," the captive prince, no longer enslaved yet hardly free, finds himself a scholarly pawn on one of the Malaysian spice islands, over which the empires of Spain and Portugal seek to wrest dominance.