Imagine a city like New York, but where intelligent robots, known as hums, walk, talk and perform all kinds of jobs. Here, young children universally wear smart watches that track their welfare. Almost everyone is addicted to personal virtual reality pods called wooms.
This is the unsettling world of Helen Phillips’s intense and propulsive new novel, “Hum.”
But this list of futuristic details may give the wrong impression. In spite of its clever science fiction elements, “Hum” reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism, an intimate and tender portrait of one mother’s day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe, and to find a little joy, in a damaged and dangerous world.
This winning mix of the speculative and the ordinary is a specialty of Phillips’s — “Hum” revisits some of the preoccupations that fueled her superb 2019 novel “The Need.” At their core, both novels are about family life, especially the intertwined pleasure and suffering of parenting young children, and how fear and love are inextricably linked.
In “Hum,” we meet a mother, May Webb, at a desperate moment. The primary breadwinner for her family of four, she has recently lost her job training A.I. Short on money, May agrees to be a paid guinea pig for a tech company’s experimental surgical procedure — performed, of course, by a hum — that is designed to subtly change a person’s face so as to evade facial recognition software.
The story really gets going when May, her skin still raw from the procedure, uses some of her face money to purchase a three-night trip for her family to a glorious place called the Botanical Garden.
This is not the New York Botanical Garden, or any garden of our reality. Instead, this walled oasis, located in the center of the city, is part Disneyland, part extravagant Instagram-ready resort and part surreal enchanted forest (one that reminds May of the real forest of her childhood, which was long ago destroyed by fire). It’s a place of woods and waterfalls, ferns and fruit trees, where the surrounding city and its many ills are rendered somehow invisible.
For May, who requests that her husband and their two children, ages 6 and 8, leave their devices behind, this trip represents an escape from the horrors of modern life: environmental degradation, the intrusion of technology on childhood, the waste of runaway consumerism. At the Botanical Garden, May’s children pick strawberries for the first time in their lives. On the doorstep of their fairy-tale cottage, fresh baked scones appear each morning, discreetly delivered by hums. May’s first moments in the garden bring tears to her eyes. “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place.”
But reality soon intrudes. Her children bicker as usual; sometimes they get bored. Her daughter discovers that some of the rocks are fake. A metal door becomes visible behind a waterfall. Suddenly, May’s children face an unexpected danger.
Phillips’s Botanical Garden is such a magnetic creation — at once delightful and mysteriously sinister — that some readers may wish the story spent more time there. Although what happens within those walls will have major consequences for May and her family, “Hum” ultimately turns its attention away from this uncanny simulacrum and toward the more familiar risks posed by the internet, surveillance and A.I.
Along the way, the story raises many unsettling questions. What is the right role for A.I. in our lives? In a world of so much artifice, what counts as authentic experience? How do we usher our children into a future that we find frightening to imagine?
This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.
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