Book Review: Hum by Helen Phillips

Over the weekend in the swimming pool, as a robot skimmer swept past me removing insects and small leaves from the surface of the water and we listened to music beamed wirelessly from my phone to a portable, voice-controllable, waterproof speaker across the patio, I was struck by the idea that we are very much living in the “future”. We may not have all of the inventions imagined by science fiction writers over the years (still no flying cars or teleportation), but when you stop to think about it, we do have more of them than we might have expected to even a decade or two ago. And while that revelation can be somewhat awe-inspiring, when one considers the pace of change and the myriad negatives that same technology has had on our society it can also be more than a little frightening. Helen Phillips manages to perfectly capture those conflicting emotions in her short but stunning latest, Hum.

May recently lost her job developing the communicative abilities of AI when the hums (human-like robots) became smart enough to handle the task on their own. Now relying on her husband Jem’s TaskRabbit-like gig work to support their small family, they are falling behind on bills while May continues in vain to find employment. Daughter Lu and son Sy are both addicted to the Bunny devices they keep strapped to their wrists, which also allow their parents to monitor their location and vitals, and to their Wooms, cocoon-like spaces they can hide in and browse the internet, while Jem relentlessly checks his phone, keeping an eye on his abnormally high customer rating.

May longs for more human connection with her family, recalling what it was like growing up before an unnamed ecological disaster struck, decimating the planet’s natural resources, but she finds her husband and children either unwilling or unable to participate. She enrolls in a trial program for a new cosmetic procedure that promises to subtly alter a person’s face enough to avoid identification by the surveillance systems in place around the city in exchange for enough money to sustain the family for several more months, and then immediately decides to spend a large chunk of her payout on a vacation to the Botanical Gardens, a walled off site amidst the city’s industrial sprawl that features lush forests, fresh fruit, and wild creatures seldom seen anymore. When she informs them of her purchase, Jem is initially worried over the expense, but the kids are beyond excited, and since her discounted rate requires them to enter the next day, they pack their things, get some sleep, and head to the park, but (at May’s insistence) without all of their devices.

While May is initially blissful in the Botanical Garden, on the second day she and Jem become separated from Lu and Sy. Detached from their technology, the hums that man the park are heavily limited in their ability to help and May begins to search frantically for them on her own as she finds herself second-guessing all of her decisions and desires. In an increasingly tech-obsessed world all she wanted was an authentic experience with her loved ones, but in so doing has she failed at her job to keep her children safe?

The near-future world that Phillips has created here is well-imagined and frighteningly plausible, perhaps because of how strikingly similar it is to today. Anyone who has ever wondered at and worried over the breakneck rate of technological advancement we are currently living through will feel an immediate kinship with May. But many of the fears she experiences are relevant in any time and will ring true to any parent, succinctly summed up by a hum who assesses her by saying, “You feel disoriented, May. You are unsure how to be in the world as it is now. You know the world is damaged, but you don’t know what that means for the lives of your children. You want to prepare them for the future, but you are scared to picture the future. You are seeking inside yourself the scrappiness, the courage, that will power the rest of your life.”

May lives in a world where everything is available almost instantly with a simple voice command. Where technology is cheap as long as you’re willing to put up with relentless targeted advertising. Where the planet is dying and jobs are disappearing and people communicate with each other via AI-generated text messages, if at all. This is alarmingly close to today by design, and it will have you questioning your own relationship to technology. Whether Hum actually inspires you to make any changes is up to you, but it’s a thoughtfully written and deeply engaging story that proves hard to put down. It’s one of my favorite reads this year and it will certainly get readers talking. Or at least checking to see if their hands look “old.” ★★★★★