HUM, Helen Phillips reveals a terrifying, sobering prediction for a possible future

HUM
HELEN PHILLIPS
Marysue Rucci Books/S&S
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost? 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.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: SciFi from a woman's PoV by an actual woman is not as rare a thing as it once was. Even women SF writers of the comparatively recent past wrote a boy's or man's PoV as often as not. Now this ignoring of The Future (as seen by women in it) is passé. We still don't see a ton of mothers as PoV characters, though.

May is such a PoV character, and she resonates powerfully with me. Her steely determination to provide for her family is the bedrock of the story. The worldbuilding is subtle, as one would expect from an author working in the (very) near future. Probably my single favorite touch of worldbuilding is one I think is largely invisible to most: May, our main charater, is married to Jem; their children are Sy and Lu.

Even their names are minimized. That most human of sounds, our names, is clipped down to the minimum of syllables, squeezing these beings into a narrower, and narrowing, bandwidth. One better suited, not coincidentally, to the vocal apparatus of the "hums" of the title.

Ah, the hums...the titular beings who represent the next (?) generation of the smartphones now falling out of favor among the young (to me) user base. If, as I suspect, their increasing disenchantment with these devices is being quietly steered, I suspect the course they're being steered ON is the one Author Phillips is showing us in this story.

The worst nightmare of a parent is to lose their children. Especially very young ones whose understanding of the World around them is unformed. Why else did the Satanic Panic/Stranger Danger epidemic get rolling? Losing a child to death by disease is less and less common...thank all those useless gods for that...but accidents, and malicious actions like addictions, malefactors who prey on the innocent are still there to obsess the fretful. Now add AI to that mix, and Author Phillips is on a winner to speak to this seething mass market. She does not do this cynically. Her brushes against the eerieness of the surveillance capitalism around us border on entry into the Uncanny Valley. Her own previous writing has been used without permission or compensation to train the generative AI we're being told will take over. I myownself think, however, that Sabine Hossenfelder's got the right handle on the reality of the eventual results. Author Phillips is wise to point to the ways this borning system is likely to fail Humanity, to the humans who still have time to change course.

Hum traverses nightmarish loss, dystopian social catastrophe, and failures of a deeply human sort in this tale. I wish I could pooh-pooh its premise, or its cconclusions, but I can't. I think all y'all who read my reviews will know what you need to know about my opinion of the read by the fact that a) I published a review on a Tuesday, 2) I was apprived for this DRC on 2 August and am reviewing it four days later, and iii) have not said, and do not intend to say, one critical word about its conception or execution.

Many of y'all do not like anything SFnal or speculative. I encourage those folk most especially to get this from the library and read it.

You're going to live it soon enough.