Ursula Le Guin imagined the future for a living, but her most prescient statement may have come in a speech. "I think hard times are coming," the writer said at the National Book Awards in November 2014, "when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope." Three years and change.

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