I regret to say that I did not enjoy this book. The title promised speculative fiction, and I saw very little of that. Perhaps it's the time that's passed between the penning of these stories and today, but I found I could not relate to the writing style. I've never understood the practice of calling a character Mr. A. (or whatever). I find it pulls me out of the story faster than a bomb going off.
All in all? I was disappointed in this one.

Mark Twain is a justifiably well known author for his books that have become part of American social history. That does not mean that all of his writings are going to be good reading material for the general masses. The stories here are not on a level with Twain's contemporary in speculative fiction, Jules Verne. Writers of the 19th century just do not use the language we are used to which makes them hard to follow.

I had no idea that Mark Twain, the man who chronicled adventures on steamboats and explored classic Southern characters, also turned his attention to the surreal.

This book offers an enjoyable collection of Twain’s lesser-known works, from brief vignettes to fully rendered narratives. I found this book to be a worthy literary adventure.

I've enjoyed, of course, Twain's great classics - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. I haven't ever read his most clearly science-fictional work, the Connecticut Yankee. I've read a few of his short pieces, mostly his nonfiction.

Any writer with such a long career is going to produce some inferior pieces, and frankly, I thought all these were among them. Speculative fiction is, of course, a term invented since Twain's time; some of these are presented as nonfiction with a bit of speculation about the nature of reality (the ones about "mental telepathy," basically the observation of coincidences), while others play in one way or another with what might be called Christian mythology. The piece "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton" does hinge on a social change facilitated by technology - basically, Internet dating via telephone - and "The Great Dark" is a fantastical speculation about shrinking a ship down to explore a drop of water at microscopic scale that wanders around wordily for a while, sometimes contradicting itself, and then stops so abruptly and inconclusively that I spent the first part of the next piece thinking it was an odd diversion in the same story.

The next piece ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven") occasionally looks as if it will explain how the captain is telling the story, but never does; often contradicts itself; rambles on for a long time, and eventually stops, again inconclusively, as if the author has finally run out of ideas or patience with his own story (some time after I did).

The final piece, "The Mysterious Stranger," is again rambling, again self-contradictory, and ultimately an almost nihilistic rant full of repetitive rehearsals of human cruelty that I partly skipped through in a fruitless search for some kind of story shape or plot.

The impression I carried away is that most of these weren't pieces the author cared about enough to plan, edit, finish, or even make coherent, and because of his reputation people published them anyway.

The Speculative Fiction of Mark Twain was a fun and eclectic collection of tales, all most enjoyable. I loved "The Mysterious Stranger", but I think my favourites were the two telegraphy pieces, because we've all experienced things such as letter crossings or people phoning just as we were thinking about them. There were some amusing and intriguing ideas in these stories, and they've certainly inspired me to fill in the gaps in my Mark Twain reading. Highly recommended to short story and speculative fiction readers.