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Asking what our world will be like just a few years from now, writers from William Gibson to Lauren Beukes draw their vitality from their knife-edge topicality. But no other type of literature has such a potentially short shelf life

YOU ONLY HAVE to turn on the television news to realise that we live in a futuristic world and that things change with dizzying speed. When rolling-news channels struggle to keep up with the pace of change, what chance do novelists stand? Fiction set in the near future casts a weather eye on the technological and social trends of today and asks, What will this be like in another 10 years? It tends not to feature aliens or interstellar travel, preferring to focus on characterisation and social commentary, and depicting a world almost identical to our own, with the addition of one or two speculative elements.