Second paragraph of third story ("Earth", by Jim Mortimore)

It hunched on a plain of black glass beneath a dully shining, blotched red globe which covered three quarters of the sky. A human being from the twentieth century might have recognised the creature as an ant, though they certainly wouldn't have recognised the cool, bloated orb which the hot yellow sun of the twentieth century had swelled over time inconceivable to become.

I'm way behind on bookblogging – I think it is more than two weeks since I finished this. It dates from the far-off time of 2005 when Pluto was still regarded as a planet, so there are 10 stories (including the recently discovered Sedna). A number of them are standard space romps, but I thought the Jim Mortimore story set on Earth with the lone Fourth Doctor brought a new perspective to the far future, and Craig Hinton's Uranus story, the last he wrote before his untimely death, with the Seventh Doctor and Mel, nicely ties into The Daleks' Master Plan. There's also a fun pairing of the Neptune and Sedna stories, by Richard Dinnick and Andrew Frankham respectively, both featuring the Third Doctor and linked by an unlikely companion from outside the TV series. Actually worth getting if you want to test your tolerance for the Short Trips series.

Next in this series is Short Trips: The History of Christmas, edited by Simon Guerrier.