Great selection of short stories. Some tied in to existing series but never left the reader feeling like they missed anything. My two favorites in this book was "The stranger" by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. and "The Death of Love" by Hal Duncan. The later had me laughing while making a serious argument about relationship and love. In all this is a very nice collection of short stories and was a blast to read. ( )

Speculative Horizons is a slender anthology of 5 short stories and novelettes. I don't think there is a shared theme to these stories, which I'd label as various types of fantasy for the most part. Each story was interesting, but nothing amazing. The five are: "Soul Mate" by C. S. Friedman, "The Eve of the Fall of Habesh" by Tobias S. Buckell (probably my favorite of the lot), "The Stranger" by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.(also very good), "Flint" by Brian Ruckley and "The Death of a Love" by Hal Duncan.

Modesitt's "The Stranger" is set within his Recluce series of books and chronologically follows "The Chaos Balance", the one book in the series that I read a number of years ago. Prior knowledge of the series is not needed at all to enjoy the story and the short story itself serves as a slight introduction.

"The Death of Love" is an odd story, with rather course language for my tastes.

The collection of stories falls solidly into the "OK, average read" area. The worst fault of the book other than some rather poor proofreading (not uncommon for Subterranean Press books, unfortunately) is that it is so slight; there really should have been several more stories. Twice as many at least. I'd say there is more fiction in any monthly issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", where some of these stories could comfortably fit. ( )