In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Recently, whenever I read the news or scroll social media, I see portents of doom in all directions. Jobs being replaced by AI, oceans full of microplastics, phones spying on our every click. I am always drawn to smart novels that can help me parse what these developments in modern life mean. Helen Phillips’s new speculative fiction, Hum, hooked me from the jump.

In a not so distant future, climate change has accelerated and technology has advanced tremendously, leaving an even more stratified society. Hums, hyper intelligent robots, have become a pervasive feature of everyday life, overseeing everything from medical tests to DMV offices—all the while trying to upsell you on products and services.

When we first meet May, she has just gone under the knife of a Hum for an experimental surgery that makes her face unrecognizable to surveillance cameras. She isn’t a privacy activist, just a recently unemployed mom, and the check for participating in the experimental surgery will support her family for months. But this decision made out of desperation proves riskier than she could imagine, and May quickly realizes one cannot escape society’s all-seeing eye without punishment…

If you wake up wondering each day: is this the bad place? This is the book you have been waiting for. It’s incisive and brimming with brilliant ideas, but it also possesses a beating heart, combining cutting-edge science with family drama. Please add it to your box so we can discuss on the (totally safe) internet.