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TIME off is for relaxing with a book, and sci-fi luckily meets our needs with a wonderfully diverse palette of approaches to the grief and trouble surrounding us. Some stories shine a light on our worst truths, others offer escapes to worlds as beautiful as they should be, and then there are those that blow your mind so thoroughly you can’t think any more.

The best canonical sci-fi puts the thinnest veil on reality to show us just how close we are to the world we fear. The London you encounter in Temi Oh’s is grittily familiar – making the near future she paints queasily plausible, including the brain implant that is being forced on citizens and the political chaos this foments. It weaves an intriguing tapestry of references, from the classical story of Eurydice to the neuroscience of consciousness, set against a drumbeat of dread.

Realism can also probe internal landscapes. In , Christopher Paolini’s moody prequel to To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, an investigation of a baffling extra-planetary anomaly functions as a metaphor for the path that must be walked to move beyond life-altering grief.

The psychology of grief goes well beyond realism in Nicholas Binge’s , whose nested set of narrators pursue one another up a mountain that has inexplicably appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And that is the least mind-bending thing that happens in this allegory of our inability to cope without closure.

What is grief if you can’t die? seems like a standard space cadets versus monsters story. But while J. S. Dewes spins a fast-paced, popcorn movie tale, be prepared for a twist that will smack the popcorn out of your hand and leave it on the floor with your jaw.

Grief can be planetary in scale, too. Emily Tesh’s is a keen observation of how catastrophe creates radicalism. In a book that is a heady mix of military space opera and sensitive character study, a girl bred for brutal combat begins to question the narratives that formed her.

Not everything is so heavy. The short stories in Julianna Baggott’s are so snackable they go down without touching the sides, but their deeper themes sneak in and stay there. Nick Harkaway’s is similar. It is good, old-fashioned gumshoe noir that has been transformed into sci-fi, with some primordial Greek mythology.

, Moses Ose Utomi’s novella, also sneaks in under the emotional radar. It is a short page-turner about a young boy in an apocalyptic city who must venture into a terrifying desert on a quest to bring back water.

Longer and denser by far is Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman, a wild ride through so many genres they defy description. If you can only read one book this summer, make sure you don’t miss this one. (And you can read along with .)

For readers who want an escape from reality that will really blow their minds, Christopher Priest offers a left-field interpretation of climate data in . Out in hardback, this is an ambitious historical novel into which the sci-fi has been laid like gold veins, questioning just how much we really know about the future.

And for an extra challenge, Emma Mieko Candon’s won’t disappoint. Here, city states were once controlled and defended by AI god-kings. When their code corrupted, the AIs violently destroyed all the people who lived there, apart from an immortal vassal who now carries the burden of the citizens’ collective trauma. Succeeding in his new mission means he must get himself together – in more ways than one.

Captivating, surprising and utterly unique, these are the novels that will help you get to grips with the future that is here, or fast approaching.

Sally Adee is a science journalist and author, she also writes New Scientist’s science fiction column