Book review: Hum by Helen Phillips, a feat in non-speculative fiction

In “Hum,” a new book by American novelist Helen Phillips, artificial intelligence is ubiquitous. Yet, it’s not a dystopia. The environment she writes about is worryingly realistic and might be just around the corner.

Let’s be real – you cannot (at least officially) alter your face in order to avoid facial recognition, smart android robots are not yet roaming around our streets, and the rich are still amongst us rather than living in isolated green oases.

Well, that last part isn’t exactly true anymore – as the planet is heating up, money is what buys you comfort while the unlucky billions suffer.

Also, facial recognition is already prevalent, and artificial intelligence is making significant leaps forward and entering our everyday lives. Personal digital privacy is melting away, and annoying advertisers who want their products to be seen by everyone everywhere are targeting you.

That’s why “Hum,” a new book by Phillips, really hits the spot. Sure, it’s a fantasy but it’s also a grim look at current concerns, coloring the routines of ordinary folk in 2024.

Content is cheap, rent is high

The year in the novel is unknown, but let’s say it’s about a decade away. The world is just like the one we’re living in now, but it’s different in that technology has become truly omnipresent.

Sure, May Webb, the main character of the book who’s a struggling wife and mother of two in a large, overly hot, and littered city, is a human full of human emotion (desperation, mostly, but also love for her kids).

But the things people do – and where they end up – have changed. May herself begins the novel-length adventure by allowing a start-up to alter her face in exchange for a lump sum of much-needed money.

Why? In order to avoid ubiquitous facial surveillance and become untrackable, pretty much invisible – at least that’s what they tell May. She needs the cash because the brave new world has no jobs on offer anymore.

And here’s the irony: May “was one of many hired to help refine and deepen the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence.” She enjoyed the process but soon, the technology exceeded human training and no longer needed them.

Hence the daily struggle. The world is indeed full of surveillance cameras, “vees,” vehicles without human drivers, litter, and yellow or brownish tap water.

The air quality is poor, and sometimes it’s better to stay in – for humans only because hums don’t care about breathing. These smart AI-powered robots, owned by both government institutions and private corporations, patrol the streets in numbers equalling mortal earthlings.

Inside their houses or apartments – and jobless citizens can no longer afford not to live in stuffy apartments – people spend their time in “wooms,” upright eggs where you climb in, draw the shades, and enjoy personally curated content streamed directly to and at you.

You only get eight minutes of uninterrupted content in the “woom” before the ads begin, though. The kids also get their “bunnies,” devices they wear on their wrists, which allow their parents to track their location at all times.

It’s all quite weird and, actually, sad. These might look like perks I could indeed seek to have myself, for example – but the costs are painful – the planet seems ruined and ruled by ruthless elites who do not care one bit about the fact that everyone else cannot afford self-respect.

“Wooms were cheap, thanks to the ads. Bunnies were cheap, thanks to the ads. Phones were cheap, thanks to the ads. But rent was high,” May concludes, quite devastatingly.

Love in the near-future

Unsurprisingly, her husband Jem is a gig worker in this world and this economy – chasing mice today and cleaning toilets tomorrow. Again, for millions of Americans, this is not a dystopia. It’s happening today as job safety has become an increasingly rare phenomenon.

May is extremely nostalgic about her childhood when she used to play in the forests that have now burned down. That’s why her goal is to use the money from the facial procedure to bring her family to the walled Botanical Garden.

This is essentially a hotel, of course – a green and woody space one enters after purchasing an expensive ticket. But May is desperate for her children to run around in the Garden, desperate to pretend for a few days that the world is still an innocent playground.

She even decides not to allow herself and her family to bring their bunnies or phones into the Botanical Garden, hoping, of course, that this will help them all immerse themselves in the experience.

“Wooms were cheap, thanks to the ads. Bunnies were cheap, thanks to the ads. Phones were cheap, thanks to the ads. But rent was high.”

At times, the language of the adventure is even biblical. Phillips writes: “They ate well of the bread and the cheese and the honey, and drank deeply of the water in the earthenware pitcher.”

Spoilers would be hard to avoid if I told you what happens in the Garden – but it’s safe to say technology, the abundance of it and the lack of it simultaneously, plays a major part in that particular subplot.

And yet, it’s also a humanistic novel about love and parenthood in the near-future – faced with robotic automation, we still find solutions and swear to at least try to get better. Writing near-future and nailing it is, of course, super hard – but Phillips somehow manages to tap into quite a few tech anxieties of humans today.

In the novel, it’s a hum that produces probably the most beautiful musing about the modern ad-based economy. Although, undoubtedly, that’s something Phillips tells the reader. Here it is:

“The goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”

The very fact, though, that people like Phillips are writing about the new reality is actually uplifting and makes me think of the novel as optimistic, that we’ll find a way. Otherwise, as one Goodreads user puts it so well, “Hum” might just be a prequel to “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.”