Hum

It’s an interesting and intriguing book and weirdly an easy read given the backdrop of the story setting. Essentially at heart it is a book about marriage, family and worries for the future. Thanks to NetGalley for the early copy.

Description:
May lives in a near-future where Hums (basic androids) are everywhere, and facial recognition is used as standard. Having lost her job and desperate for money to keep her two children living comfortably, she takes part in lab tests of an anti-facial recognition face-alteration treatment. Then she spends some of the money on taking her family to a rare and expensive forest retreat, where something disastrous happens.

Liked:
Convincing and compelling. There's not much about this fairly dystopian future that feels unbelievable or out of reach. The family is painted with loving detail and feels absolutely real, flawed and sweet and claustrophobic. This book made me feel super tense and stressed; I sympathised hugely with the protagonist and her troubles. Really impressed by this one.

Disliked:
Can't think of anything! I know others have mentioned the ending as a low point, but I liked it. It’s abrupt and unknowable, but I think that absolutely suited the themes.

Would definitely recommend. I’ll be checking out more by this author. Read if you like all things Black Mirror-esque.

A near-future dystopian novel that is a liiiittle too close for comfort. I was really impressed by the writing, the book really drew me in and I read it fairly quickly, and even though nothing explicitly terrifying happens, it's filled with dread and suspense. I honestly found it more scary than a horror novel.
It also described motherhood in a way that I have never read before, which I thought was very interesting and moving.

This near-future story of a mother struggling to cope with a society under constant surveillance (your phone knows you're pregnant before you do) might sound like a cautionary tale, yet we now live in a very similar environment. This novel will appeal to a wide range of readers because it is so well written and wonderfully plotted.

Helen Phillips writes disturbingly dystopian sci-fi, an artfully unsettling piece of speculative fiction, set in the near future, that is thought provoking and raises questions about the way we are currently living, the inequalities, technology, our closest relationships, marriage, family, being a mother, and our sense of identity. There is an underlying ominous tone in the complex, well constructed world building, a world that is chaotic, shattered by the effects of climate change. we have constant surveillance, the prevalence of 'hums', intelligent robots, contributing to May, losing her job working in AI, she has become superfluous to requirements. This leaves May with the burden of debt and a need to secure a way of making enough to live on, at least for a few months, for her struggling family, her husband Jem, and children Sy and Lu.

It is this that leads May into agreeing to an experimental procedure, key in a world dependent on facial recognition, altering her face sufficiently, rendering her unrecognisable to AI. However, there are to be repercussions to this that May does not see coming. Keen to provide some respite in this strained and smart AI consumer dominated environment for her family, May purchases a 3 day pass for the lush, green, Botanical Gardens in the city, primarily for the rich, leaving their devices at home. Here, everything starts to descend into a hellish nightmare as May's children come under horrifying threats. Feeling ever growing levels of stress, anxiety and tensions, May is pushed into having to trust a 'hum'.

Phillips manages to capture our contemporary zeitgeist, when the attention of so many are on their mobile devices, even when walking about on the streets, a constant unceasing hum. We live in a world where convenience is highly prized, delivered through improving technology, with few having the wit or desire to ask the pertinent questions, what is the price to be paid for all this? This is an intriguing and gripping read that resonates, touching on a litany of crucial and critical nerves when it comes to the way we live, unfortunately it does not feel in the least bit far fetched, no matter how much I wish it to be so. A compeling read that I recommend for all readers. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

A deeply unsettling and disturbing novel, but in all the right ways. This is a book that will make you think and make you fearful, because it's all oh so believable.

Set in a near-future world, it's essentially the story of May Webb, as she struggle to cope in a society where her roles as employee, wife and mother are all being gradually supplanted by artificial intelligence bots.

As well as looking at the risks of AI, it also raises issues around identity, anonymity, climate change, environmental degradation, rampant consumerism, toxic media and the financial uncertainty of the gig economy. That's a lot of big concepts to cram into one book, and yet it's so skilfully done and so well-written that there's never any risk of the reader feeling overwhelmed by it all. The storyline is tightly focused on one family over the course of one week, so it's an incredibly intimate book. It's that sense of intimacy which magnifies how terrifyingly uncertain this future world is and how easy it might be to fall though the cracks when decisions are made by AI and not people

I devoured it in a single morning - I just couldn't put it down. An absolute must-read book for anyone who enjoys thought-provoking and suspenseful speculative fiction.

The best dystopian stories for me teeter so close to where we are now. They provoke and unsettle because they not only feel so possible, they are rooted in reality. Like The Handmaid’s Tale; inspired by and based on real events around the world, only twisted very subtly or sometimes not at all. We gasp and say “Thank God the world isn’t like that” only to see in the headlines the next day a woman murdered for not wearing the right item of clothing or incarcerated for making choices about their own body. In Hum, the inspiration comes from headlines relating to climate change, capitalism, social media, technological advancements, facial recognition software, Alexa, Google Glass, woven through a very identifiable story of a flawed mother (aren’t we all?) trying to do everything she can to protect her children from the impact of the changing world around her. Some reviewers have mentioned being put off by the ending. I thought it was genius. The endnotes are almost as enjoyable as the rest of the novel. And how grating are those adverts?! Brilliantly perceptive, horribly close.