“The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.” This first line of Helen Phillips’s sci-fi family drama, Hum, certainly made me flinch. It’s a great example of how to start a story with something, well, eye-catching. However, sometimes novels that start strong will struggle to improve upon, or even maintain, the interest that initial moment creates. Hum doesn’t fall into that category. We might not get the tension-filled body horror that the opening line promises, but there’s plenty to make you squirm in this novel.
The novel is set in a near future where robots called hums have taken most of the manual work and May, the protagonist, lost her well-paid job to AI. The household income is reduced to her husband Jem’s odd-job gig work, not a sustainable situation with their two school-age children. So May accepts payment to undergo an experimental face-altering procedure. She reminds Jem of their precarious finances when he calls it “skin money.”
“Rent money,” she corrected, a flash of rage. “Grocery money. Dental bill money.”
He took his hands off her face, turned away from her with a pained sigh, reminding her of other middle-of-the-night conversations that had ended with a pained sigh. Staying up too late, exchanging panic about the children’s futures, what will this planet hold for them by the time they’re our age.
Career jobs have disappeared, but this is still a consumer-based world running on an economy that artificial intelligence seems to control. This power structure is so anchored in society that it’s hardly commented on. May almost convinces herself that the operation is an extension of the gig economy her husband works in. Still, payment for undergoing experimental surgery is different from doing odd jobs. This is a price tag on a body. That said, it would be a lazy, and unnuanced, analysis to say this is simply a future form of prostitution. But there’s an uneasy relationship between May’s facial alteration and Earth’s oldest profession. She is, at least, selling her face. Motivation is another link. Hasn’t skin money always been the same thing as rent, grocery and medical money? This, of course, assumes that more people sell their bodies out of practical necessity than career choice.
An even more disturbing element of this story is how hellbent the machines are on recovering May’s money. After her procedure, the surgeon-hum writes her prescriptions and suggests an extra treatment.
“There is another rejuvenating face crème that might be of help to you. Rosehip and cucumber. Would you like me to order for you now, May?”
“You mean another prescription?”
“Not exactly,” the hum said, “but it does have anti-aging properties. Do you approve this transaction, May?”
She kicked herself for not noticing when the hum switched into advertising.
Targeted advertising is on computers, and computers are everywhere, from the hums to the home entertainment pods called “wombs” to children’s wrist computers called “bunnies.” And of course, it’s still on their phones. It takes a Herculean will to go a day without making unplanned purchases.
And indeed, once May has paid for rent and groceries, she takes the underground directly to the Botanical Garden to buy her family a three-night vacation. In this world, which is in advanced stages of environmental collapse, the Botanical Garden is paradise. It also has promos on all her social media platforms.
She likes she likes she likes she likes she likes, but in truth she could hardly stand to look at them at all […] These selfies and just-a-little-moment-of-bliss shots gushing forth from those vacationing at the Botanical Garden, jam-packed with flora, fauna, plates of richly colored food, earthenware mugs filled to the brim, wooden boxes of truffles, hands overflowing with berries, feet wading into clean water, children running through meadows, human faces in various states of relaxation, a resplendent hum bearing a bowl of peaches.
A rich vacation for a family struggling to pay rent. Has May’s criteria for what’s necessary been warped by her environment? It’s complicated. The descriptions of the Botanical Gardens sound lush, but they’re highlighting what’s absent in May’s daily life: colorful food, wild fruit, abundant drink, clean water and relaxation. You don’t need to be a doctor to know that many of these things are necessary for human survival. It’s a testament to the quality of Phillips’s worldbuilding skills that we can so easily slip into May’s frame of reference and view access to “clean water” as luxurious. Though I imagine a reviewer from Flint, Michigan might have a more experienced perspective.
Only a hum bridges the gap between May’s normal life and the Botanical Garden. It’s an indication that the hums are normalized enough to fit comfortably in a setting “jam-packed” with flora and fauna. They’re seen as a part of nature itself. Both inhabitants, human and hum, escape the world’s pollution, intrusions and distractions in the Botanical Garden.
This is a product of the growing emotional equivalency people are beginning to feel between themselves and technology, particularly with the hums. It can be seen in the awkwardness May feels when a pharmacist-hum can’t identify her post-op face and she has to put her hand on its torso for fingerprint identification. It feels “like a slight violation, undeservedly intimate, to touch a hum there.” A more dramatic example is when her automatic taxi runs over a hum to avoid an accident with a delivery vehicle.
Out the window, there was a body on the pavement, in the crosswalk.
It was a hum, so no blood.
But a body on the pavement looks like a body on the pavement.
This presents a central question to the novel: to what extent should humans see robots as emotional equals? To what extent are they? A body is a body. This equivalency shows how May’s empathy for the fallen hum is approaching what she’d feel for a human. She’s unconsciously asking herself what the hums must feel. In this world, the definition of emotion needs to be broadened, but it hasn’t. When May asks why the taxi hit the hum, it says, “I swerved in order to protect you, May.” This follows Asimov’s Laws of Robotics stating that, above all things, a robot must not harm a human. But are these ethical laws enough? Protection from physical harm almost seems like a distraction technique. Hasn’t technology’s control of the economy and administration crippled humanity financially and emotionally? In this world, the definition of harm needs to be broadened, but it hasn’t.
Hum is a thoughtful and touching exploration of the emotional uncanny valley that troubles human relations to technology. Instead of the classic robot-apocalypse/human-uprising plotline, Phillips portrays a humanity that stuck its head in the sand as the machines quietly took over. It’s hard to blame them. The hums are convenient, helpful and generally friendly. Many people suffer. But the novel still manages to find beauty in this world, as well as space for hope in the nascent humanity growing in technology. “Hum,” after all, is more than half of the word for “human.”
Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books
Publication date: August 6, 2024
Reviewed by David Lewis
David Lewis’s reviews and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, Barrelhouse, Strange Horizons, The Weird Fiction Review, Ancillary Review of Books, 21st Century Ghost Stories Volume II, The Fish Anthology, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, Paris Lit Up and others. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog.