When the pandemic shut everything down, pandemic fiction surged. Similarly, people in grief often reach for books about grief, and those who suffer heartbreak might read romance.
But what do you read when the world feels…generally, unspecifically chaotic?
I’ve always been drawn to chaos. I studied math in college because I wanted to describe the shape of trees—fractals, rivers, branching patterns—but I ended up in climate activism instead. Climate change, too, is a story of chaos: not gradual warming, but broken systems and tipping points.
When I started writing my debut novel, The Unmapping, I thought it would be an escape from this work. But it became something else—an exploration of getting lost, of disorientation, of crisis. Then the pandemic hit, and that, too, made its way into the book.
Now crises stack. And the question I keep asking is: how do we live in this? How do we become who we need to be? That’s what I explore in The Unmapping, and what I look for in novels in times of need. In this chaotic era, I hope these books can offer a framework for reflection or a structure to hold onto.
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
What better way to ground yourself than to literally understand the ground beneath your feet? Timefulness, written by geologist Marcia Bjornerud, is as beautifully written as it is educational. It offers a sobering, even terrifying, perspective on the speed of current climate change when viewed against the vast backdrop of Earth’s history. But I particularly loved reading the sections on tectonic plate movements, with explanations so clear and satisfying that I felt my body shift with understanding, as the movements of the Earth suddenly made sense in a way they never had before.
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
The only other nonfiction on this list, though it is about fiction—particularly, how fiction can fail to fully take in the scale and violence of climate change. There is no blame cast, only an insightful account of what sort of stories led us to this point, and how fiction might be able to show us the way out.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
This collection of nine stories deals with time travel, robots, artificial intelligences, multiverses, and more, with academic rigor that is yet clear and easy to understand, leading you gently through complex trains of thought. Written by the genius author of the story that inspired the movie “Arrival,” they will leave you feeling like you understand the world better, even through technological upheaval. They are structurally tight, little doses of perfection.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
The Moon explodes in the first sentence. That’s the premise—and the aftermath is as epic as you might imagine. Seveneves explores human survival in the face of planetary catastrophe, and not everyone makes it. But the sheer audacity of the human will to survive, adapt, and imagine something new is breathtaking.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
What if your dreams could change reality? And what if you couldn’t control them? Le Guin’s novel is a philosophical science fiction classic about unintended consequences, power, and the impossibility of engineering utopia. As always, she brings compassion and rigor to the thought experiment.
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the second book of a trilogy, but it stands on its own. Take a break from Earth for a minute to hang out with brilliant scientists on Mars as they terraform the planet. It’s a slower, more character-driven take on worldbuilding in every sense of the word, and as fun to read as it is inspirational to see these scientists grapple with the unknown and make real progress.
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Yes, there are aliens—but they are hardly in this story at all, the first of a trilogy. The book, instead, is about humanity—how we respond to distant (or not-so-distant) threats. What starts as a story about Chinese scientists during the Cultural Revolution becomes an epic spanning millennia. It’s dense, cerebral, and challenges how we think about civilization, survival, and the scope of human understanding.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Some of the books on this list are heavy, so let’s turn to something quieter: a cozy sci-fi that feels like a warm cup of tea. Set in a post-collapse world where humanity has rebalanced its relationship with nature, this novella follows a tea monk who leaves their structured life in search of meaning—and meets a robot who hasn’t seen a human in centuries. What follows is a slow, thoughtful journey through forests, questions, and conversations. There are no battles, no villains, no urgency—just a gentle exploration of purpose, rest, and what it means to be enough in a chaotic world.
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
I recommend this book to everyone I can. It’s a quiet epic—a meditation on the human psyche and the fleeting, ordinary moments that make up a life. When a mysterious new star appears in the sky, no one knows what it means. But instead of launching into sci-fi or apocalyptic drama, the novel stays grounded in the everyday: parenting, grieving, grocery shopping. We follow a cast of characters as they move through their lives with a creeping sense that something has shifted. The novel resists easy answers. It leans into ambiguity and the slow, eerie feeling that something big is happening just beneath the surface. It reminds us that chaos doesn’t always arrive with a bang—sometimes it drifts in quietly, and meaning is found in how we choose to pay attention.
