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.

"So you're telling me we're going to be automated out of existence," Romesh said. "I'm telling you that what you're doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and if you had any morals you'd shoot yourself." The complaint was made in a bar that was mostly cigarette smoke by this point, and to a circle of friends that, having gathered for their quarterly let's-meet-up-and-catch-up thing, had found each other just as tiresome as before. Outside, the city of Colombo was coming to a crawl of traffic lights and halogen, the shops winking out, one by one, as curfew regulations loomed. Thus the drunken ruminations of Romesh Algama began to seem fundamentally less interesting.