Short Trips: A Day in the Life

Short Trips: A Day in the Life is the thirteenth Short Trips anthology.

Publisher's summary
When you're time travellers, the concept of a day — from midnight to midnight — can get lost: the Doctor and his companions arrive on different planets in different eras at different times of the day. They can show up during someone's lunch break or when they're asleep, at the breaking of dawn or the coming of night.

Throughout his adventures, the Doctor meets many people — security guards on a night shift, mysterious space travellers riding the vortex, mobs of blobby Kobolds, a family sitting down to watch TV — but all too often their interaction is brief, a fleeting connection in the web of history.

Time, it seems, is very much of the essence...

day n. : 1: a period of twenty-four hours as a unit of time, esp. from midnight to midnight. 2: a point of time.

"I can't make your dream come true forever, but I can make it come true today." - Doctor Who by Matthew Jacobs

In the early hours of the morning, a rock star gives a one-off comeback performance within a virtual-reality dreamscape... Over breakfast, a woman waits for the love of her life to walk through the doors of a café... The afternoon sees vital peace talks between two warring factors... A new UNIT recruit faces a terror at dusk on his first day on the job...

A Day in the Life features seventeen stories whose total "running time" adds up to a single twenty-four-hour period: a fictional "day in the life of the universe" made up of fragments from throughout time and space.

As we leave one story and join the next, we switch location and era — but not the hands on the clock...