Collections

From ancient nuclear wars, to the secret of sexual attraction, with stops along the way for Bigfoot, ancient demons, and the truth behind alchemy, the stories in this book will take you on a truly fantastic journey through versions of Texas that were, could never be, and might have been. Steam played a big part in the first rocket launch from Texas, which was about a century earlier than we thought ("A Rocket for the Republic"). An unexpected experiment still running in the abandoned Superconducting Supercollider will introduce you to "The Witch of Waxahachie". And where would you go if global warming forced you out of Dallas? Maybe "Rome, If You Want To"? After that, ask yourself if a flying saucer is worth a silver dollar ("The Silver Dollar Saucer"). The possibilities are limitless in Lou Antonelli's new collection, Fantastic Texas. Born in Massachusetts, Antonelli is a newspaper editor and up-and-coming author of speculative fiction.

Following Lou Antonelli’s critically praised first collection, Fantastic Texas, comes another collection of some of his very best. Lou is easily one of the hardest working and most recognized short story writers in science fiction today. This collection includes many incredible stories such as “A Rocket For the Republic,” “Professor Malakoff’s Amazing Ethereal Telegraph,” “The Cast Iron Dybbuk,” “Silvern,” “The Witch of Waxahachie” and many more! Look for stories set not in just the Lone Star state, but also on Mars, on asteroids, and in deepest space.

A collection of alternate and secret history short stories. From airships lost between universes, to golems winning the fight against racism, Lou Antonelli explains the many ways the world might have been. Dip into this collection of previously-published tales, and you'll experience: • Where technology suppresses magic in an apartheid-like state. • Ancient civilizations that succumb to their own nuclear holocausts. • Alternate worlds in which Christianity is just one of many minor Earth-bound religions, and others where it rules and spans outer space. • How the America's westward expansion would have happened if the New Madrid earthquake had allowed the North American inland sea to reform. Here you'll find Antonelli's version of Brigadoon, and of the sinking of the Titanic and the Carpathia . You'll visit alternate realities that have been hiding Neanderthals, and pick up the lost Kodak snapshots of what might have been. With cameo appearances by O. Henry, Robert E. Howard, and Rod Serling, join this wild ride and delve into demonic possession, immortality, and the infinite variety of other worlds. Including the 2013 Sidewise Award for Alternate History finalist short story "Great White Ship". Lou Antonelli is a modern speculative fiction author with classic sensibilities, honed by a long career as a newspaperman.

A Writer's Odyssey — a quest to get published by one of the most prominent short fiction editors of our time. This book is hard to classify, difficult to categorize. If you flip randomly through the pages, you’re most likely to think it is a short fiction collection, specifically of science fiction and fantasy stories. But look some more, and you might think it’s a how-to book, the topic being How to Break Into Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. On the other hand, you’d be justified in thinking it’s a memoir of a kind, of one author’s efforts to break in as a published science fiction and fantasy author. Finally, you could even be forgiven in thinking it’s a history, telling the tale of the last days when science fiction and fantasy original fiction was mostly propagated in print, not pixels, in real magazines made of paper compounded from ground up trees. You’d be right in all cases, because this book combines all those threads and tells a narrative I hope you will find interesting combined with science fiction and fantasy stories I know you will find entertaining.

A reprint collection of 21 traditional science fiction and fantasy short stories published between 2003 and 2011.

“Outstanding and unexpected tales that grip the imagination and twist its tale.” —Joe R. Lansdale “This swell collection of four 2-handed stories has all the hallmarks of the best collaborative work: it doesn’t read like, nor is the subject matter, like either writer’s usual concerns.”—Howard Waldrop