Helen Phillips's HUM

Thanks to partners NetGalley, Simon Element, and Marysue Rucci Books for the digital ARC of Helen Phillips’s Hum. The book will be published on August 6! 

Helen Phillips’s Hum is one of those books that crawls into the deepest parts of my brain—the niggling thoughts and fears that surface most often in the middle of the night—and just won’t leave. It’s speculative fiction set in the very near future, a novel that unearths the ugly threat of our pathways and habits.

The setting is a city devastated by the climate crisis. May and her family—her husband Jem and children Lu and Sy—have struggled to survive on his gig work since May lost her tech job to hums, robots driven by the very AI she’d been training. Out of desperation, May signs up for adversarial tech surgery. These small modifications to her face will prevent her from being recognized by the technology that runs her city.

The large payment she gets in exchange is meant to go to practical costs like rent and medical bills, and May does take care of some of those. But in a spontaneous (but not really) move, she also buys nonrefundable tickets for a family weekend at the Botanical Garden, the only place where they can access the type of nature that is now lost, the type of nature that surrounded May while she was growing up.

Despite Jem’s misgivings, the family embarks on this trip within the city, with May determined to make the weekend a perfect oasis within the gritty darkness of their lives.

This world is one where adults are always on their phones; where children’s lives are tracked and fueled by “bunnies,” wearable wrist technology; and where people spend much of their time within Wooms, immersive isolation pods in which occupants are completely surrounded by screens. But May wants to break these connections, insisting that they leave their phones and bunnies behind.

Hum isn’t a comfortable book; there’s too much that’s recognizable, and I often felt deeply seen (and not in a good way), and every page of the book is thought provoking. But. It’s when May’s children go missing in the midst of the Botanical Garden, untrackable (no bunnies!), that the story really ramps up . . . as did my anxiety . . . even (especially!) when a Hum steps into help.

Phillips, the author of The Need (another amazing book), is juggling so much here: Hum features deeply drawn characters and an incredibly compulsive plot alongside resonant questions about the path we’re all on and where it may be leading. I couldn’t look away, from the book or from what it reflected back at me. This will be one of my top books of the year.

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