Go ahead, dream about the future

Rose Eveleth is a brilliant writer and science communicator, and her engaging, fascinating podcast looks at possible (and improbable) futures and tries to imagine how they would shake out. If you want some practice visualizing how the future could turn out, this podcast is a great workout for your imagination — and your brain generally.

This anthology contains 25 stories about possible futures of the United States, by some of today's most exciting writers. (Full disclosure: I have a story in there as well.) This book is like a brilliant kaleidoscope of future scenarios — some dystopian, some hopeful, but all of them lived-in and vivid.

There have been five mass extinctions on Earth before now —- including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. And all the signs point to the another mass extinction on the way, thanks to all the ecological damage we've been doing to our planet. Newitz, the founder of io9, looks at a scary future and shows all the lessons from the past that might help humanity to endure.

Jemisin has won multiple awards for her Broken Earth trilogy, but her short-story collection is just as brilliant. It's full of memorable characters, beautiful writing and starkly well-imagined futures. Including her beautiful award-nominated story "Non-Zero Probabilities," and the story that provided the seed for her new novel The City We Became. This is the kind of imaginative fiction — and futurism — that we desperately need right now.

This novel and its sequels take place in a world where democracy has been reorganized to work better at the local level, and government as we know it has been redefined. This book is part thriller, part daring thought experiment about a radically different way of electing our leaders —- and the ways in which it could go wrong.

Le Guin's Hainish stories pretty much span her entire career, starting with her first published novel, Rocannon's World, and including the renowned The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her interplanetary Ekumen includes over a dozen well-fleshed-out worlds and cultures, and it only gets deeper and more complex as she continues to develop it. And it includes a future Earth, which has become a part of a much bigger and more diverse community.

These five books start out pretty autobiographical, following Lessing's own youth in 1930s and 1940s Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia), her exploration of radical politics and her move to the United Kingdom. But in the fourth and fifth books, the story takes a more experimental turn, and eventually passes the present day and keeps going into the future. It's a high-wire act that's both stunning and inspirational for anyone who wants to imagine how today could turn into tomorrow.