The novel comprises 106 short chapters. The chapters mostly alternate between the two protagonists: Mary, as she leads the Ministry, and Frank, as he seeks to act on his frustrations from surviving an extreme heat wave. However, numerous chapters are presented from the point of view of other characters or nameless narrators. The style also shifts from chapter to chapter, from third-person narration of the two protagonists to first-person presentations of others, including object narratives of a photon and a carbon atom. Various chapters also take the form of meeting notes, an encyclopedia article, a prose poem, a Socratic seminar, and explanatory essays, among other styles of writing. Describing this presentation, Robinson stated that the standard structure of the novel did not work for the topic and story he wanted to write. He was seeking to write with an "international scope," with characters who provide explanations for how or why institutions and systems work the way they do and how they might change. His editor at Orbit Books, Tim Holman, encouraged Robinson to try an alternative approach that resulted in various modes of writing, principally unnamed characters providing eyewitness accounts but also could take the form of an essay, drama, dialogue, radio interview, riddle, etc. Robinson, in an interview with Amy Brady, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books, described his approach as heteroglossia or polyvocal, in which the form follows function.