I love humor. I'll check it out.

Thanks! I'd read and liked Rainbows End but do need the quicker reads. I'll check it out.

Thank you so much!

Thanks! I'm so ignorant of poetry that I didn't think to even request it. I'll check it out.

I absolutely agree, as I elaborate on in this response. What particularly jumps out to me is how they predict technological change but totally miss social change ("The housewife of the future will do her chores with the press of a button." Students: "What's a housewife?")

Thanks! I love Dyson's Disturbing the Universe but didn't know about The Sun, The Genome and the Internet.

Agreed (although there will still be a half a year left for hoverboards to be invented). See my fuller response.

Thanks for the suggestion and second. My students (and I) are very interested in issues such as the distribution of wealth.

Absolutely, that was always part of my plan, although I find it more illuminating to share the stories/articles that were wildly wrong, to teach students a healthy skepticism. I'll check out "A Logic Named Joe" in any case.

Thanks! I love "Superiority" and will check out the others.

Thanks a lot! Both that site and its blogroll look fun and useful.

First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.

Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.

Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.

Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".

Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.

Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.

Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.