January Books 25) Short Trips [19]: Dalek Empire, edited by Nicholas Briggs with Simon Guerrier
In an agony of indecision before Christmas when Big Finish announced that they would stop not only publishing but even selling their Short Trips anthologies, I bought half a dozen of them (based on a combination of reported scarcity and LibraryThing ratings) of which this is the first in sequence. It's a bit variable, to be honest; I was not blown away by the three Dalek Empire series of audio plays, and about half of these stories are explicit tie-ins to it (and it also includes the script for the Seventh Doctor crossover into that series, "Return of the Daleks", which has a rather implausible though well-conveyed denouement). The standout pieces for me were Simon Guerrier's "The Eighth Wonder of the World" (despite its unexpected revelation that Evelyn Smythe is an archaeologist as well as a historian) and James Swallow's "Museum Peace", which I already knew as it was released as a Big Finish audio freebie late last year.