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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.

Free sample

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.

Member ratings (733)

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The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
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Skye Falling
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Things We Lost to the Water
Libertie
What's Mine and Yours
The Bad Muslim Discount
The Push
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In a Holidaze
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Practical Magic
Head Over Heels
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All Adults Here
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& Sons
Family drama
View all
The Last One at the Wedding
The Night We Lost Him
Madwoman
Hum
Family Happiness
Husbands & Lovers
Same As It Ever Was
Jackpot Summer
The Lion Women of Tehran
Did I Ever Tell You?
Real Americans
The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Just for the Summer
All We Were Promised
Hard by a Great Forest
Family Family
Northwoods
Mercury
The Second Chance Year
A Winter in New York
Check & Mate
What We Kept to Ourselves
The Leftover Woman
While You Were Out
Evil Eye
Just Another Missing Person
Family Lore
Little Monsters
The Connellys of County Down
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Paper Names
Divine Rivals
Hang the Moon
The Last Russian Doll
Maame
White Horse
The Family Game
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
When We Were Bright and Beautiful
You're Invited
Marrying the Ketchups
Part of Your World
The Good Left Undone
The Verifiers
The Unsinkable Greta James
Don't Cry for Me
Black Cake
Olga Dies Dreaming
The Family
The Book of Magic
Sankofa
Everything We Didn't Say
Apples Never Fall
The Sweetest Remedy
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
We Are the Brennans
Skye Falling
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
Things We Lost to the Water
Libertie
What's Mine and Yours
The Bad Muslim Discount
The Push
The Chicken Sisters
In a Holidaze
White Ivy
The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany
Practical Magic
Head Over Heels
The Vanishing Half
All Adults Here
The Kingdom of Back
I Have No Secrets
Saving Zoë
Color Me In
Past Perfect Life
Things You Save in a Fire
There's Something About Sweetie
All That You Leave Behind
The Other Woman
Small Fry
The Winter Sister
The Rules of Magic
& Sons