May loses her office job when the “hums” – humanoid robots – render her role obsolete. It’s hard to find work again. She hears of an opportunity to earn several months’ salary by receiving an experimental facial injection, and takes it. The injection will render May’s face unrecognisable to the ubiquitous hums. She’s a guinea pig for a form of adversarial AI, a technology designed to confound the processing of other tech. She returns home in pain, and looking very subtly different. “It’s really OK,” says her husband, Jem. “I just have a slightly new wife.”
Life is not easy for May and Jem and their two young children, Lu and Sy. Jem, formerly a photographer, takes gig work via an app, doing the odd jobs that rich people don’t want to do: removing corpses from pest traps, or clearing rotting food from a fridge. The air in their city is poisonous and the tap water is tainted. Rubbish blows around; birds, plants and animals are traumatised, shrivelled or extinct. May, Jem, Lu and Sy are all addicted to their devices, spending long periods alone in their individual “wooms”: networked isolation chambers, like a smartphone you can crawl inside.
Hum is Helen Phillips’s sixth book and third speculative novel. Her first, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, was praised by Ursula Le Guin, and her second, The Need, was shortlisted for a US National Book award. The novels are conceptual, dealing with big data and paleobotany, but they have a thriller-like intensity. Hum induces a nervous wariness that comes in part from the disturbing events May reads about in the news. “According to a new survey, more humans had experienced intense negative emotions in the past calendar year than at any other time in recorded history.” A woman is arrested for hiding needles inside strawberries on shop shelves. “Five hundred million plastic bottles are discarded in your city each year!” An orca carries the corpse of her calf, pushing it before her or holding its tail in her mouth, for 10 days.
These news headlines, scattered through the novel, contribute to Hum’s world building, enveloping May in an unsettling atmosphere. At the back of the book, references disclose that they are all true stories or events that Phillips has lightly rewritten. Her depiction of a conventional family struggling to pay the bills and breathe clean air, and trying not to pass too much of their lives on their devices, is also painful and familiar.
The real world is present in May’s gruelling life, its exploitative systems and the distressed environment that she longs to escape. When she receives payment for her injection, she immediately overspends on a family holiday to the Botanical Garden, a forested area walled off behind the city. Soon after they arrive in the garden, something disastrous happens. The crisis that unfolds fuses several different contemporary predicaments: online shaming, the stranglehold of tech corporations, and the bewildering proliferation of surveillance, which can both cause and resolve an emergency.
Hum has a convincing quality of understatement: it is gripping, but its plot doesn’t abide by the spikes and crescendos that the dystopian setup led me to anticipate. There is no dramatic or bloody confrontation. The stakes rise and then somewhat recede. It’s a thoughtful and graceful novel, not very long, told in short chapters, with an offhand turn of phrase that immerses us in May’s threatening environment, and just occasionally permits a glimpse of the richer world she craves: clean air and water, the smell of cedar, or the “quartet of cardinals” her mother sees one day, “such a red”.
There is a crucial scene in which a hum uses a screen on its abdomen to show May and her family images of their potential futures, created using their extant data. It’s a turning point and also a moment of provocation, reminding the reader how the many recent films and novels set in disastrous near-futures can collectively be seen as a kind of forecast: frightening but not implausible. Many of these stories propose extreme and terrifying scenarios of apocalypse or cruelty. Hum, instead, is poised between speculation and reportage. It’s mesmerising and scary.
• Hum is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
