I've never read anything by Eric Brown before, but I was in the mood for some short science fiction stories and the cover of this book caught my eye.This turned out to be a really rather good collection of ten modern sci-fi stories. Each story is readable in around half an hour or less. The themes include variations on first contact, telepathy and time travel.Venus Macabre: Death as performance art - reminded me a lot of the short story Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds.The Frankenberg Process: An interesting take on faster than light travel concentrating on the people left behind.Skyball: My favourite of the collection - a nice body/mind swap story set in future India.Bengal Blues: Another story set in India featuring empaths and telepaths.The Nilakantha Scream: A mildly disturbing first contact story.The Thallian Intervention: A rather good alien intervention story set in the 1920s.The Tapestry of Time: Time travel and archaeology (one of my favourite combinations).The Frozen Woman: A nicely done time time travel love story.Crystals: An alien ship crash lands on Earth killing all the crew; a near future first contact story.The Angels of Life and Death: Another first contact story with a race of near immortal beings of pure energy.The Kindle presentation is faultless with no obvious errors at all, an active table of contents linking to each story and a good cover picture. There is also a rather nice little introduction to the stories by the author which adds to the the overall feel of the book.Overall: 5 stars - Ten thought provoking high quality sci-fi shorts stories.