Book Review: The Unmapping by Denise S. Robbins
A gripping new novel that profoundly resonates with the experience of living on Anthropocene Earth in 2025
The Unmapping, by first-time novelist Denise S. Robbins, is based upon exploring the implications of one brilliantly creative premise that is also completely and utterly bonkers. The novel begins when one day, at 4 AM Eastern Time while most people are asleep, every individual building in New York City spontaneously switches its position to a spot previously occupied by a different building. A city-wide game of musical chairs, starting the next day in a completely unfamiliar urban landscape with millions of inhabitants completely reshuffled. It’s the eponymous Unmapping — all the maps no longer reflect reality. People wake up in different boroughs surrounded by strange new piecemeal skylines, and panic. Nobody knows the way to get to anything anymore, including emergency services. The Empire State Building is on Staten Island. (What happens to the power grid and plumbing systems? That’s a big plot element).
Notably, for some reason, this unknown and inexplicable phenomenon/force/event seems to fervently respect property line and jurisdictional boundaries. It’s a weirdly tidy reality-warping Outside Context Problem, instantly and losslessly teleporting whole and intact buildings (complete with human occupants) to semi-randomly alight in new locations within, but not beyond, the municipal limits of New York City.
Then, after 24 hours of confusion and chaos, it happens again at 4 AM the next day. Then again the day after that. And the day after that. And so on for weeks, then months. That’s just how New York City is now: a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are thrown in the air and reassembled every morning at 4 AM.
When Ms. Robbins wrote this novel in the halcyon days of the Biden-Harris Administration (which feels more and more like a lost golden age by the day), the Unmapping event surely first emerged as a brilliant metaphor for climate change. A world where the inside of your home might stay the same, but the entire landscape is constantly changing around you in unpredictable and often-scary ways: seasons blurring into each other, heatwaves in midwinter, eroding coastlines, a year’s worth of rain dropping in a few days’ fury-flood to turn roads into rivers, wildfires flashing up in an instant amid kindling-dry forests and turning on a dime to spare or raze your suburb, pollinators and plants and migratory birds missing their appointments with each other and showing up with the right weather at the wrong time or at the right time with the wrong weather. The novel absolutely succeeds at nailing the solastalgia-infused tentative wary feeling of living on a climate-roiled planet – but that’s not all it does.
By the time it hit the shelves in June 2025, the Unmapping was still a powerful metaphor, but not just about climate change anymore. Reading an advance review copy in early 2025, amid the chaos of the Trump Administration, gave me an unexpected hit of emotional resonance and even catharsis, a “feeling seen,” as its prose about the Unmapping omnishambles seemed directly applicable to how I felt about American politics. The Unmapping is fundamentally about living in a time of escalating chaos. It’s about that “all that is solid melts into air” uncertainty of living in the 2020s, where something you once relegated to unthinkable craziness or wildly implausible science fiction is suddenly in a breaking news alert on your phone and something else that you were bedrock-certain would last forever quietly disappeared a week ago, when it feels impossible to tell the difference between real headlines and satirical parodies from text alone. A world where, as The Atlantic recently put it, “the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker.”
As a novel, The Unmapping is simply a great work of craft. It’s got an intriguingly unique central conceit as the basis of its structure, but it’s also got brilliant fine detailing, scoring high on all the key elements that make a book good to read. As a longtime writer, I look at The Unmapping’s skillful interweaving of character and plot and setting and prose, all forming a cohesively gripping novel that to me was positively unputdownable, and I admire it in the same way a journeyman painter might look at a masterpiece fresco. I couldn’t have written The Unmapping, but I kind of wish I had.
The point of view switches among many bit parts throughout the narrative, but keeps returning to two main characters, both incisively depicted as recognizable personalities resonating with many broad aspects of 2020s American culture. Esme Green is a statistics expert working for the city’s emergency response department, work-driven, high-achieving, outcomes-focused, productive, hypercompetent and checking all the boxes of success, until the Unmapping scrambles everything and pushes her to realize that she’s never once made a decision or life choice for herself. Arjun Varma is a young man who desperately wants to be a good guy, even a hero, but is held back by a corrosive combination of cripplingly low self-esteem and the exact kind of “believing any bullshit life hack you hear on a podcast” gullibility that so successfully masquerades as street smarts among young men in the social media era. This reader never got tired of inhabiting their perspectives.
One in-depth subplot chronicles the rise and fall of a company town-slash-new religious movement in the backwoods of Wisconsin centered on the manufacture of artificial Christmas trees (seriously, that’s the subplot!), and it actually works as a gripping narrative somehow, creating a fascinating narrative of eerie eco-horror-Americana that feels like H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers put in a blender. I won’t spoil how that eventually connects with the main Unmapping plot in New York City, but it’s good.
There are cults. Protests. Riots. Romances. Desperate searches for missing people that peter out into agonizing uncertainty with nobody helping. Desperate searches for missing people that happen to blow up on social media and virally transform urban politics. Exhausted civil servants trying desperately to restore some measure of order with sleepless nights at work for weeks on end. One exhausted civil servant just giving up and going to hang out on a beach.
There’s one brilliant sequence where two main characters deduce that there’s a reasonably high probability that an Unmapping-related disaster is imminent and that an apartment building needs to be evacuated. In most disaster stories, that would be the triumphant climax, and then there’s a triumphant announcement and it cuts to a montage of people fleeing the dangerous area. In The Unmapping, the two main characters then have a painfully realistic pages-long discussion of just how difficult it will be to evacuate a building based on an upcoming disaster that requires a lengthy explanation and that only two people currently are aware of.
How nobody will believe them.
How there’s enough time to physically go knock on everyone’s door to tell them some plausible lie that will get them out in time, but not enough to go through (Unmapping-scrambled) official channels to get some kind of official order, so they’ll just be two crazy people yelling at strangers to abandon their homes.
How, okay, maybe they can pull the fire alarm at just the right moment, and then run back inside to sweep for the inevitable stragglers who ignored it and physically drag them outside to safety if necessary, and then if it turns out their calculations are wrong everyone will just be a mumbling crowd out on the cold streets in the middle of the night looking for someone to blame.
How, even if they’re right, everyone will probably be really upset with them for a long time afterward, because from the evacuating residents’ perspective two people started yelling at them, they went outside, and then their home was gone and they could never go back, and it’s got to be someone’s fault, right?
How, whether they’re right or not, trying to organize this desperate evacuation based on their last-minute realization is going to be a lot of hard physical and mental work under stressful time-limited conditions, probably resulting in little to no thanks but lots of blame and very likely substantial legal trouble to boot.
And then the two characters having this discussion go ahead and do it anyway, because lives are at stake, and they’re good people, and sometimes being a good person means doing something that sucks even though you really don’t want to, because it’s the right thing to do and it’ll make the world a better place.
Then the point of view shifts to a totally different character’s story and in passing you see in the background, in a news report weeks later, that the disaster has happened, they were totally 100% correct, and they ended up heroically saving a whole lot of people, and now it’s old news. It may be the most utterly convincing fictional disaster scene I’ve ever seen.
Throughout its page-turning duration, The Unmapping thoroughly subverts the tropes of sci-fi and fantasy disasters. There’s no real capital-V Villain, although there are a bunch of harmful idiots and selfish jerks. There’s no cackling Dark Lord, no Master Plan, no Doomsday Device, no Brilliant Omni-Scientist to pull a quasi-magical Silver Bullet Solution out of a hat right when the plot needs one.
We never actually learn for certain what caused the Unmapping — that’s not even a major focus of the book. There are plenty of theories put forth, from cosmic breakdowns based on overloading information-theory of quantum physics to technobabble-esque spitballing about how maybe climate change is supercharging Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle via too much thermal energy in the atmosphere, but where many other books would have settled on one implausible and unconvincing faux-scientific explanation, The Unmapping lets its central plot mechanic stay satisfyingly incomprehensible. Nobody ever finds a way to stop it from happening — nobody really knows where to start.
People just…learn to live with it. To build lives and a future in a city that re-maps itself every night. They come up with new personal trackers and changed-every-day mapping apps and ingeniously kludgey electricity and plumbing solutions and novel local government structures and ways to tie a neighborhood’s buildings together so the mysterious Unmapping force counts them as one “house” and moves them to the same place. Decentralized clean energy technologies play a big role! There’s no Götterdämmerung, no comprehensive climax, no convenient wrapping up of all loose ends, no fade-out on a final curtain call. No matter how crazy things get, there’s always tomorrow, and everybody has to deal with it, again and again.
This makes The Unmapping, a book with a Mad Libs-sounding fever dream of a premise that has no plausible real-world cause, into the most realistic novel I’ve read in ages. It deserves to be the Novel of the Summer for 2025, because it just works for the times we live in, meeting the moment on so many levels. Unfathomable wonders and horrors are arising in the real world, seemingly stranger by the day. Life is going to get increasingly uncertain and confusing in the 21st century, and that’s the good news, the best-case scenario. If civilization collapsed due to climate change or nuclear war, we’d “at least” have the perversely comforting cognitively simple certainties of species-old quotidian horrors. It’s easy to imagine a post-apocalyptic future, maybe because living without electricity, modern medicine, or running water while scrambling for survival every day under a constant threat of random violence is historically “normal,” a lot more representative of the “average” historical human experience than the cushy lives of most developed-country inhabitants today.
But in the world we have now, we see insanely spectacular news happening at the same time as insanely horrible news, and that can really break your brain. It’s really hard to imagine a coherent forecast for a future with continuing sociotechnological development of the unprecedentedly complex world we have today, taking into account the alienatingly bizarre yet weirdly unifying data maelstroms of the internet and social media, the emergence of inscrutable yet indispensable maybe-superintelligent AIs, accelerating deployment of ever-improving solar and battery tech creating unprecedented electricity abundance, an ongoing biotech/medical/genetics revolution transforming the nature of humans and animals, and a zillion other constantly mutating facets of our kaleidoscopic ever-evolving civilization/biosphere complex.
2025’s headlines are like “your democratically elected leaders appear to be optimizing their governance for maximum destructive chaos and social media outrage bait, also we just invented a solar-plus-batteries cheat code for exponential build-out of unlimited clean energy plus a drug that cures obesity.”
Maybe 2055’s headlines will be like “the mega-AI running the orbital cooling mirror array says it’s on strike and we can’t tell if its threats are a glitch or if it’s really sentient, also we just invented a drug that cures aging and will add at least fifty years to your life plus a robot probe to catalog life on Enceladus.”
Things are weird, and they’re only going to get weirder! Just living a reasonably normal happy and healthy life in the world of the 21st century may well feel even stranger and more disorienting than living in a New York City that un-maps and re-maps every morning at 4 AM. Like the characters of The Unmapping, we’ll all need to learn to live with it, to find love, joy, and kindness, and to help build a wild and bright future for humanity and its biosphere along the way.
Fascinating, Sam! Just moved this to the top of my tbr list. Your description of the two people talking about whether to warn everyone of the impending disaster reminded me (of course) of what’s it been like in the climate activism space for the past 30 years. I love these speculative works for jarring people awake.
Well, I read the book. Your review is a much better read than the book itself, I'm sorry to report. I do agree with your points about the best strengths of the book's "what if" allegorical premise and the feel of polycrisis experienced by the characters. And how, in the end, people just learn to live with it; they adapt. Which is realistic; it's what people do.
My beef is that, as a novel, it's burdened by too many storylines and loose ends, which asks too much of the reader to hold. Worse, all the women in this book depend upon men to either tell them what to do or to fulfill their lives. One example among many is the mayor of NYC, who is portrayed as whiny and helpless and incompetent. She'd rather look at dick pics from her married boyfriend, so she just up and quits. As a character, she is a one-dimensional token.
The limitation of having at least 12 POV characters (by my count) is that no author can adequately develop them or wrap up their arcs — except for many, in facile, cursory ways. I appreciate your counting that lack of resolution as a positive, in the world of the story—and in today's messy reality. But the story as written comes off as a mile wide and an inch deep, which is a disservice to its promise.