In many ways, Helen Phillips’ new novel Hum is less a pure, plot-driven speculative fiction story than a good old-fashioned dystopian allegory of the present ‒ fable-like and motherhood-centric.
It is the near future in a New York-like city in a world devastated by climate change, with hyper intelligent, empathetic robots called “Hums”, and everyone addicted to VR “wooms”, connected isolation chambers.
The protagonist, May, receiving a windfall for participating in a paid experiment to see if slight surgical alterations to a face can trick the facial recognition of the city’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras, decides to splurge on a weekend for her family at the Botanical Garden, a rare, verdant and Instagrammable sanctuary in the dirty city’s heart.
Sometimes Hum’s commentary on the present is a little too on the nose. May’s previous job, for example, was training the AI network that ultimately made her obsolete. Her husband Jem is a former photographer reduced to gig work as a cleaner. Most of the time, however, Phillips delivers a mix of domestic realism and subtly unsettling wrongness. The kids, Lu, aged 8 and 6-year-old Sy – it’s the future, so everyone has a silly name – dote on their pet cockroach and have an unhealthy fixation on disaster-preparedness manuals.
And then everything turns to crap. Or, I suppose, becomes crappier. May performatively deprives the children of their future equivalent of mobile phones so they can immerse themselves in the last vestiges of nature. But the garden is no Eden, an important subplot, and Lu and Sy get lost in the city and their now-hysterical parents have no way to find them. The Hums quickly locate the children and return them to their parents.
Parental and environmental anxiety overlap in what is an emergent genre. “Mom lit” showed up early in the 2000s when authors such as Rachel Cusk, Rivka Galchen, Jenny Offill and Lauren Groff wrote coded confessionals about women feeling guilty for prioritising their personal creative or career ambitions over their children (or vice versa) as a critique of the idealised maternal caregiver.
Groff and Offill have already made the leap, adding “eco-anxiety” fiction into the mix, the likes of Kate Zambreno and Sally Rooney being already there, and Hum joins them. This is literature that asks how to raise children in a dying world.
Phillips avoids much of the navel-gazing by creating a dying world that is indeed a dehumanising grind but not without hope. May’s story goes public, and she becomes the focus of social media hate and state investigation of her children’s safety.
The resolution is clunky, a happy-ish ending at the expense of putting the characters back in their boxes and authorially sweeping the awfulness back under the carpet. We are left with more questions than answers. But if you just like a good yarn, especially if you want to feel better about motherhood in the age of enshittification, with some particularly elegant writing, Hum has plenty to offer.
Hum, by Helen Phillips (Atlantic, $36.99), is out now.
