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Hum by Helen Phillips

Dystopian

Hum

by Helen Phillips

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Quick take

Combining family drama and an incisive portrait of surveillance tech, this dystopian parable will leave you pondering.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Creepy

    Creepy

  • Illustrated icon, Salacious

    Salacious

  • Illustrated icon, Techie

    Tech world

Synopsis

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.

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Get an early look from the first pages of Hum.

Hum

1

The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.

Above her, the hum hovered, immaculate and precise. The steadiness of metal, the peace of a nonbiological body. She had heard of elderly people who, at the end, chose hum company over human company.

The hum paused to dip its needle-finger in antiseptic yet again, then re-extended its arm, a meticulous surgeon. Its labor was calm, deft, as hum labor always was.

Yet the pain grew crisp as the needle moved across her skin toward the edge of her eye. A slender and relentless line of penetration. The numbing gel must be wearing off.

She had twice endured childbirth by imagining her way out of her body, into a forest, the forest of her childhood, a faint path weaving among evergreens. But now the forest of her childhood was receding even in her memory. She needed to picture some other forest, not that particular forest, which was gone, burned.

A forest. She tried to force her mind into a forest.

The hum retracted the needle and, with the fingers of its other hand, carefully reapplied numbing gel to the area around her eyes.

She felt that the hum had read her mind, though she realized it was simply reacting to the mathematically dictated decrease in the gel’s effectiveness over time.

“Please let me know,” the hum said, such a soothing voice, “when it is numb again, May.”

Long before hums existed, she was one of many hired to help refine and deepen the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence. She had taken satisfaction in the process, in the network’s increasing conversational sophistication and nuance, and her small but meaningful role in that progress, until the network exceeded human training and no longer needed their input. But despite all those years of hours spent at her desk, in dialogue with the network, it was very different to be speaking to a hum in person, to have a hum’s actual body near her actual body, each of them taking up a similar amount of space in the room.

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Why I love it

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.

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