Second paragraph of third story (“Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear):

He was idly watching the drones – several in the colours of local TV channels – gathering pictures of the traffic, when his phone morphed to the colour and ring-tone which indicated an urgent work-related call.

I got this because one of the six short stories in it was shortlisted for the BSFA Award in 2018, and back in those blessed days one could reasonably hope to read all of the BSFA nominees before voting. It didn’t win, but the anthology has been sitting on my electronic bookshelf for the last six years and I have finally read it.

It turns out that these are outputs from a writing workshop held at a small UK convention in 2015, so they’re a little raw. The best is not the BSFA-nominated “Angular Size”, by Geoff Nelder (though it is the only one that passes the Bechdel test), but “Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear, telling a story of future ivory smuggling in Kenya. None of them is actively bad, though, and it didn’t cost me much. You can get it here.

This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018, and the sf book that had lasted longest unread on my shelves. Next on those lists respectively are Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu, and De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhaut.