Hum
A Novel
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Table of Contents
About The Book
A Best Book of the Summer for Esquire, Electric Lit, and Town & Country
A People Book of the Week
From “one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction” (The New York Times), this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) and “tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world” (Esquire) is an urgent and unflinching portrayal of a woman’s fight for her family’s security in a world shaped by global warming and rapid technological progress.
In a near-future world addled by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. Desperate 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 reprieve from her recent hardships and her family’s addiction to their devices, May splurges on passes for her family to spend three nights respite in the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals still thrive. But when her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives to save her family.
Written with “precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Hum is a “striking new work of dystopian fiction” (Vogue) that delves into the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.
Reading Group Guide
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.
Discussion Questions
May undergoes a significant procedure in the story. What do you believe motivates her decision, and how does it reflect broader societal pressures?
Discuss the role of hums in the narrative and world setting of the novel, and what it symbolizes in terms of human connection. How would you feel interacting with a hum?
How does technology and societal change affect the dynamics of May's family? Consider the role of “bunnies;” does this technology feel realistic or familiar to your world? Have you encountered discussions around children’s use of technology?
The story juxtaposes the natural world with technological advancements. Discuss how Phillips portrays this relationship and what commentary the novel offers about our future.
Examine how technology in the book impacts personal identity. How do characters struggle or adapt to technology that alters their sense of self?
May’s life is upended by a viral video. In what ways does the story address the consequences of our online lives clashing with our real-world existence? Have you experienced a viral piece of media being misinterpreted or deeply affecting someone’s life?
Discuss your experience with artificial intelligence; is it part of your daily home or work life? What benefits and shortfalls have you experienced with artificial intelligence?
What could the Botanical Garden signify in May’s life? How does its portrayal contribute to the novel’s narrative and thematic depth?
Hum dives into topics such as job loss, financial stress, and health care. Are these pressures familiar to you? How would you behave if faced with the same stresses May’s family experiences? Discuss the socioeconomic themes explored in the novel.
Reflect on how May and Jem balance parenting and their relationship; what three words would you use to describe their marriage? Do you recognize elements of their relationship in your own life? In what ways does their environment impact their marriage?
Helen Phillips includes endnotes detailing her research into artificial intelligence, climate change, and technology. Were you familiar with any of the examples or media listed? Is your experience of the novel affected by exploring these real-life examples and inspiration?
Reflect on the quote by Paracelsus included in the book. How do its details of poison and remedy relate to the story’s events and themes?
Activities
Reeling from their time in the Botanical Garden, May takes solace in baking banana bread for her friend Nova. Search online for a banana bread recipe and either bake together with friends or share during your group gathering.
Research public parks or botanical gardens in your community and plan a visit. Imagine how it would feel to be Sy or Lu visiting nature; discuss how reading Hum may influence your appreciation of green spaces.
To continue exploring the themes found in Hum, consider reading Helen Phillips’s other acclaimed works, such as The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Discuss corresponding themes in Phillips’s work, like the unique insights into humanity, society, and the individual’s place in a rapidly changing world.
Author Q&A
Tell us about the inspiration for Hum; how did the story first come together?
One evening some years ago, I was walking home from work and the thought crossed my mind that I needed to buy dishcloths. When I got home and opened my computer, dishcloths were immediately advertised to me. This made me feel eerily surveilled (but, for the sake of convenience, I went ahead and bought the dishcloths). That uncanny sensation stayed with me, though, and became part of the inspiration for Hum. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the algorithm knows that I need dishcloths, but what if that sort of consumer surveillance was taken to an extreme? This was one of the questions I set out to explore in Hum.
Your portrayal of children as characters in your work has been praised for its authenticity and voice. How do you approach writing young perspectives and dialogue?
Children contain as much complexity and dimensionality as adults. When I’m writing child characters, I always try to keep that in mind. I want to evoke their joy, their anxiety, their tenderness, their vulnerability. They deserve the same dignity as adult characters. (Also, it probably helps that I’m in the process of raising two children.)
Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?
I am fortunate that from the earliest age when I could write a story, around six years old, I recognized how much I loved doing it. Soon after, at age eleven, I lost all of my hair due to the autoimmune condition alopecia. I gave myself the New Year’s resolution to write a poem a day, a practice I continued until I was twenty-one. Writing has always sustained me in difficult times. For a while in college I thought that I should commit myself to something more practical, but after college I admitted to myself that writing was my path, even if that meant doing other work to support it.
Hum explores parenting in a changing world deeply influenced by technology and artificial intelligence. How have you experienced technological advances in your own life and work?
The technological advances that have taken place just in my own lifetime feel quite dizzying to me. My children can’t even conceive of not being able to FaceTime with their grandparents. That particular use case seems entirely positive to me. But I also have a lot of concern about the way that our technologies can distract us and distance us from the people around us and from our own thoughts.
Did you have any favorite scenes or characters to write?
Just as the Botanical Garden is a refuge for May, it was a refuge for me. It was refreshing to write those scenes of sheer natural beauty during the strange isolated days of the pandemic (even though it does turn out that the Botanical Garden isn’t quite the simple sanctuary that May was seeking).
And, I loved writing May’s children, Lu and Sy, their unexpected reactions and non sequiturs.
The Botanical Garden is a dream setting; where did the inspiration for the utopian environment and details come from? Have you traveled to a destination that granted you the same reprieve and joy that May’s family initially experiences?
The Botanical Garden is a mashup of many places I love: the foothills west of Denver, where I grew up; Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Botanic Garden; a certain courtyard in Taos, New Mexico.
The ending of the novel is open to interpretation; how would you like readers to understand the conclusion?
I consider the ending of each of my novels a collaboration with the individual reader. How do the reader’s own experiences and ideas color their understanding of the conclusion? I rewrote the ending of Hum countless times in order to craft a carefully calibrated ambiguity that would illuminate different plausible implications and allow room for the reader’s own interpretation.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Hum?
The epigraph for the book is: “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.
The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy,” from Paracelsus (a German-Swiss physician, philosopher, and alchemist who lived from 1493–1541).
How might we dose our technologies? How might we dose our usage of our planet? How might we dose our children’s independence from us? I hope Hum raises these questions for readers.
May fights to connect with her family, with nature, and with herself in a world that seems designed for disconnection. I hope that readers might think about how they can nurture the connections in their own lives, and how we might work collectively to build a world that prioritizes connection writ large.
About The Author
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children. Find her online at HelenCPhillips.com or on X @HelenCPhillips.
Product Details
- Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books (August 6, 2024)
- Length: 272 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668008836
Raves and Reviews
“This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.” —New York Times
“[A] striking new work of dystopian fiction… Textured, intimate, and taut with dread, Phillips’s latest is a well-crafted machine with a throbbing pulse.” —Vogue
"A familiar yet distorted world in which a desperate family clings to rare moments of joy.” —PEOPLE, 'Book of the Week'
“A tense dystopian thriller set in a near-future where sophisticated artificial intelligence threatens human existence as we know it.” —TIME, “25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer”
“Phillips’ skills as a stylist and keen observer of human nature keep us feverishly turning pages. And her unexpected humor lightens the mood.” —Los Angeles Times
“[An] eerie but fundamentally warmhearted novel.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“The fearsome power of Phillips’s imagination always dazzles, but in this prescient novel, it’s the tender portrait of love and care in an uncertain world that leaves a lasting mark.” —Esquire, The Best Books of Summer 2024
“This chilling vision of a near future, one where its dwellers ‘can’t avoid the void,’ resonates unnervingly with the way things already are. Readers won’t be able to look away.” —Publisher's Weekly
"With propulsive intensity and extraordinary finesse and insight, Phillips keenly dramatizes the love and terror of parenthood in a poisoned, high-tech, yet not utterly hopeless world." —Booklist
“The world of Hum feels not too far from our present day reality. [Hum] makes you, the reader, deeply uncomfortable (in a good way) about the advances in AI and our dependence on technology.” —Town & Country, "The 39 Must-Read Books of Summer 2024"
“The true wonder of Hum lies in its chilling reflection of our present times. However, Phillips cuts through the bleakness of the fictitious world she has created by transporting readers deep inside May's psyche, the tumultuous beating heart of the novel, to witness the tender humanity no amount of technological advancement can destroy… an intriguing novel about motherhood set in a technologically advanced future.” —Shelf Awareness
“Phillips’ new novel again shows her talent for finding warmth, humanity, and connection within an all-too-conceivable dystopian landscape… Writing with precision, insight, sensitivity, and compassion, Phillips renders the way love and family bonds—between partners, parents and children, and siblings—can act as a balm and an anchor amid the buffeting winds of a fast-changing, out-of-control world. A perceptive page-turner.” —Kirkus (starred)
“A dystopian, futuristic hellscape just around the corner, Hum digs into our tenderest wounds... Infuriating and enthralling, Hum rushes along with an undercurrent of panic about our own not-too-distant future.” —Electric Lit, The Best Books of the Summer, According to Indie Booksellers
“Helen Phillips (The Need) imagines a dystopian future that’s about five minutes away, in which the very fundamentals of society have been shifted by climate change, AI, surveillance tech, and our relentless electronic devices. When a desperate mom agrees to a dangerous experiment, things get even darker.” —Goodreads, "Readers' Most Anticipated Summer Books"
"Unsettling... Hum effectively shows us that no one (bar the exceedingly rich) will be protected from the effects of climate change or a deregulated AI revolution." —Locus Magazine
"A humanistic novel about love and parenthood in the near-future." —CyberNews
"Hum is a prescient, unnerving and excellent novel of a future that seems frighteningly possible. It's the story, in part, of a mother just trying to make her family happy and how the world punishes her for it. Helen Phillips writes with sharp insight and sly humor, making her critique of our current moment feel timely and timeless." —Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women
"There’s a lot going on in this novel, but trust Helen Phillips to navigate it effortlessly.... It’s Anxiety Central, but in a good way." —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
"What’s more intoxicating than a Helen Phillips novel? Her books have blown open the doors of what’s possible with the art of storytelling—and her latest, Hum, is her best work yet: one that captures, with fire and grace, our future and what it means to love, to persist, and to be human. This is a hold-your-breath book. Buckle up and get ready to deeply feel the joy—the thrill, the magic—of reading." —Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey
"A transcendent portrayal of artificial intelligence, love, the fate of families, and the emergence of synthetic beings beyond human imagination." —Clifford A. Pickover, author of Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History
"Hum is something special. Helen Phillips is something really special. This novel is gripping and a true page-turner that made me think about our current world in completely new ways. Ultimately and most importantly, I closed the last page with a profound, deep love for the simple, beautiful and very human lives we lead."
—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also a clear and analytical eye. Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future. I loved it.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander
PRAISE FOR THE NEED BY HELEN PHILLIPS
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
“Like parenthood itself, The Need is frightening and maddening and full of dark comedy…Phillips, as careful with language as she is bold with structure, captures many small sharp truths. She is very good on drudgery and tiredness and marital resentment... With forensic precision Phillips identifies the price a parent will pay for tuning out just for a second, because that will certainly be the second when someone rolls off the bed or gets a finger trapped in the door…Everyday life, here, is both tedious and fascinating, grotesque and lovely, familiar and tremendously strange.” —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (EDITORS’ CHOICE)
“Brilliant...It’s not hard to see why high-wattage contemporaries like Lauren Groff and Emily St. John Mandel have lavished praise…a sort of narrative nesting doll, a story infused with both essential home truths and a wild, almost unhinged sense of unreality....What Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat) builds from the first paragraphs is too clever, and moves too quickly, to be easily ground down in a review. Even the vaguely unfinished ending, less a full stop than a sort of pregnant pause, feels somehow right; a fitting coda to her spare, eerie marvel of novel, both beautifully familiar and profoundly strange. (A–)”—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“If the challenges of parenting young children have ever driven you to the brink, you’ll recognize what’s happening to Molly Nye—for about 10 pages. This fever dream of a novel starts like a thriller (someone’s in the living room), morphs into speculative sci-fi (the intruder is from a separate universe) and ends up like nothing you’ve ever read before. In a good way.”—PEOPLE
“Molly’s struggle to remain her full self while giving so much of herself away is electrifying...Mothers will recognize so much in this fresh novel — but they aren’t the only ones who should read it. Phillips has found a way to make these experiences universal, acknowledging the importance of the other — the creature without whom none of us would exist.”—WASHINGTON POST
"A taut thriller…Between chills, readers will notice the pleasures of Phillips’s prose. Her style combines the sensibility of a poet with the forward drive of a thriller…Phillips’s crystalline style vividly evokes her characters. She draws them so precisely that before we know it, we’re deep inside their lives...[A] bewitching, fiercely original novel.”—BOSTON GLOBE
“Hyponotically eerie…An ode to motherhood and a nightmarish rendering of its ‘pleasures’ and pains…Phillips structures her astonishing fifth book in edge-of-your-seat mini-chapters that infuse domesticity with a horror-movie level of foreboding, reminding us that the maternal instinct is indeed a primal one.” —LEIGH HABER, O MAGAZINE
"The Need is a taut, thrilling rendering of motherhood at its most psychologically terrifying."—VANITY FAIR
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Hum Hardcover 9781668008836
- Author Photo (jpg): Helen Phillips Photograph by Andy Vernon-Jones(0.1 MB)
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