Helen Phillips’ new novel, Hum, opens with a character named May in a futuristic operating room, where she’s having her face altered just enough to evade facial recognition software. She’s a paid guinea pig in this experimental procedure because she’s desperate for money after losing her job in a most ironic way: She trained A.I. robots until they were so good that one replaced her.
The operation lands May enough money that she treats her husband and two young children to a mini-vacation away from the dystopian wasteland where they live. Inside the lush Botanical Garden, forests, streams and animals still flourish… and so do intelligent robots called “Hums.” May insists that her family abandon their addictive electronic devices to enjoy a few days of life off the grid, and predictably, things don’t exactly go as planned.
Phillips packs a wealth of research into this work of speculative fiction, which explores marriage, motherhood, technology and climate change. Much like her previous novel, The Need, Hum combines near-future dystopia with raw human emotion, and her stellar writing and short chapters move the story along at a fast clip. Some of the most anxious scenes involve May’s interactions with the Hums, which combine near-human emotion with detached intellect and a relentless barrage of advertising.
Hum offers much more than standard suspense fare, including expansive endnotes that detail Phillips’ research into artificial intelligence and other topics. “At times,” she writes, “the information contained in Hum is a slightly exaggerated version of a recent fact or statistic.” And that is precisely what makes it so terrifying.
