Arabian Wine
by Gregory Feeley

Description:
A fine, funny trans-historical adventure, so well-furnished and well-wrought it seems more true than the more boring truth. Read it with a double espresso.
-- John Crowley

an elegant, low-key historical fantasy [. . .] Aficionados of quirky, understated speculative fiction will be rewarded.
-- Publishers Weekly 21 February 2005

Arabian Wine is not so much a book as a little piece of renaissance jewelry, densely ornate with amber and amethyst, small and perfect. Open it, and it will reward you the way Venice does, with tiny passages opening into broad squares, and sly jokes; moments of beauty and of sadness.
-- Maureen F. McHugh

In this tale about the tragically brief pre-history of steam engines and coffee in renaissance Venice, Gregory Feeley has written an allegory as timeless as Machiavelli's Prince and as timely as yesterday's headlines from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He also paints panoramas as telling and meticulous as any by Canaletto — especially in his depiction of the Arsenal, the first assembly line of Western Civilization. All in all, another top-notch historical fiction from a writer who is fast becoming the Walter Scott of the twenty-first century.
-- Thomas M. Disch

Arabian Wine will surely stand as one of the best novels of 2005.
-- Rich Horton, Locus March 2005

An abridged version of this story previously appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.