When the present is scary, the future can be virtually unthinkable. But it's at times of great change and uncertainty--and 2020 surely qualifies--that it is most important to try to look ahead, to think about how decisions made right now can reverberate. This year, Future Tense Fiction--a partnership of Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination--published 12 stories that take very different looks at the years to come. In the case of Max Barry's "It Came From Cruden Farm," that future is very near--it's set on Inauguration Day 2021, when a new president learns that the U.S. government has custody of an alien, and it's complicated. Other futures are more distant; as part of our package of three stories on artificial intelligence and governance, "The State Machine," by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, follows a graduate student trying to learn about the very earliest days of his country being run by A.I. Tobias S. Buckell's "Scar Tissue," Holli Mintzer's "Legal Salvage," and Karl Schroeder's "The Suicide of Our Troubles" all grapple, in very different ways, with legal rights for nonhumans.

Over the past few years, Future Tense has occasionally published short science fiction, including a story from The Windup Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi on a murderous robot and one from Emily St. John Mandel, of Station Eleven fame, on time travel. Our resolution for 2018 was to invest more in sci-fi. So each month this year, Future Tense Fiction has published a short story by an exciting author, paired with a response essay by an expert who examined the real-world questions it raised. Each quarter was organized around a theme, offering opportunities to see how three different writers approached similar topics. The holidays offer a great excuse to curl up with the device of your choice and catch up on a little short science fiction.