“this sleek ride of a novel further cements phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.”

New York Times

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 cams.

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.

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.

praise

“This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips’s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.”

New York Times

“Phillips specializes in imparting a gentle shimmer of uncanniness to the intimacies of domestic realism… In Hum, Phillips keeps her world just one degree shy of recognizability, deftly turning the dials of similarity and difference, a mechanic fine-tuning eeriness instead of car engines.”

The New Yorker

“Hum would not be as good as it is—and it is very good—if it were simply about the perniciousness of technology or people’s exploitation of the natural world. What makes this book riveting is how Ms Phillips uses an anxious, robot-filled setting with a warming climate to probe more prosaic anxieties about marriage and parenting.”

The Economist

“Phillips has given us a lot to chew on, but there is also something comforting embedded in this cautionary tale: an homage to our adaptability, our capacity to love and our willingness, however reluctantly, to embrace the new … Here she urges us not to surrender our power to choose and to resist, but to be thoughtful warriors, deciding for ourselves how we will dwell on our imperiled planet.”

Los Angeles Times

“Helen Phillips presents potential outcomes in measured, elegant, chilling prose. It would be fair to call the work dystopian, or futuristic, or a harbinger, but the novel should not be reduced to its fizzy topicality … Phillips’s writing is perilously good and unsparingly perceptive … Marbled with glints of dark humor, this novel avoids sanctimony, offering revelation in its stead.”

Washington Post

(A) thoughtful and graceful novel … poised between speculation and reportage. It’s mesmerising and scary.

The Guardian

“Set in a future altered by climate change and technology that may feel uncomfortably close at hand, 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 with a generous perspective on motherhood, identity, and the pitfalls of ‘progress.’”

Kirkus Starred Review

“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 with 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

"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

"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

“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

"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

“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

“[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

“Phillips’ short stories and earlier novels have been compared to the work of Calvino, Kafka, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and Lorrie Moore. But she’s truly an original. Hum is speculative fiction at its best.”

Lit Hub

“In this bracing speculative parable from Phillips, set in a near future devastated by climate change, a woman loses her job to the robots she helped build … 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.”

Publishers Weekly

“Hum is an urgent, hauntingly beautiful work of speculative fiction that takes stock of our present moment. In our fast-paced, ever-evolving world, Phillips asks us all to take a second and consider what really matters—and what we truly can’t live without.”

Sierra: the Magazine of the Sierra Club

“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.”

Shelf Awareness

“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

“Helen Phillips has been writing prescient and compelling speculative fiction well before that Venn Diagram meme with 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 was a gleam in its mother’s eye. She is uniquely attuned to how we live now, and she writes in quick beautiful bursts (there isn’t one extraneous word in her prose) about how what we regard as routine can turn on us in ways both subtle and extravagant.”

The Maris Review

“When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum.”

BookPage

“Hum is a thoughtful and touching exploration of the emotional uncanny valley that troubles human relations to technology.”

The Masters Review