What are your children going to be when they grow up? Are they even going to be human? Thinking about the future is compulsive; it's irresistible.

Each of the books listed here comes at the future from an odd angle. Each captures the sheer weirdness of the human project far better than books that wear their futurology credentials on their sleeves.

Carl Elliott's Better Than Well (Norton, £19.95/ offer £17.95) punctures the bubble of newness that surrounds our obession with self-improvement, surgical enhancement and recreational drugs. Elliott reckons that when we turned away from religious belief, we lost our best alibi for being imperfect. We turned our desire for perfection away from God and on to ourselves: and now we are giving ourselves a hard time.

Anyone who slogged through Oliver James's Affluenza has to read this: a smarter, funnier and infinitely more helpful diagnosis of the modern malaise.

David Levy's Sex and Love with Robots (Duckworth, £12.99/£11.69) claims that the next generation will be physically entwined with animated plastic dolls, and will be a lot happier for it. Levy doesn't think robotics will enable us to conquer Space, Time and the Body.

Equally, he doesn't think the humanoid robots under development in Japan will usher in the end times. He simply has the measure of what people are like: generally kind, full of yearning, and in need of a hug. Robot companions, in Levy's deadpan vision, seem no freakier than pets.

James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia (Penguin, £7.99/£7.59) tells us what we can and cannot do about the changing climate. He's one of the few thinkers on this issue prepared to say which battles are worth fighting, and which battles are lost.

Lovelock's refusal to moralise our predicament is by turns chilling and refreshing. Selfishness, greed, political mismanagement and shortsightedness are not the point. We are simply too many, and we are having far too much fun, and there is not a lot we can do about this but die in large numbers. Every species has its season, and ours is done.

The future is going to be odd, shaped by a world and by a physics that are much, much bigger than we are. Fiction carries further than opinion. First published in 1885, Richard Jeffries's After London (Dodo, £14.95/£13.46) is the first great English novel about evolution. Set far in the future, it describes a world that has continued to adapt; domestic animals have evolved into frightening wild forms. Its plot - a hallucinatory journey across the poisoned marshes of a sunken London - is as powerfully focused as anything by J.G. Ballard.

Farther still into tomorrow, The City of Viriconium (Spectra, £8.99/£8.54) misreads itself back into existence again and again, cheating the End of Days by chasing itself along its own songlines. Since 1980, M.John Harrison has been fighting a one-man war against the domestication of literary fantasy. His ironical tales of an uninhabitable city refuse to be bounded; they are as frustrating, frightening and as irresistible as the future itself.

Simon Ings is author of the novel The Weight of Numbers and the nonfiction book The Eye: A Natural History.

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