Hum

i picked this up because the premise sounded like something i had been waiting for someone to write properly. not a big dramatic AI uprising story, not a government collapse dystopia, just an ordinary woman in a world that has gone wrong in incremental familiar ways trying to get through a weekend with her family. that is the whole thing. and Phillips does it so well that i finished it in one long sitting and then felt slightly strange about the world i came back to when i put it down.

May is a mother of two in a city that is hot all the time and crowded and full of debt and screens. her family has Hums, which are humanoid AI robots that have been everywhere long enough that her kids have grown up around them and find them completely normal. the Hums are good at everything. they do surgery and childcare and customer service and they do it all better than the humans who used to do those jobs. May and her husband Jem have lost income because of this in ways the book does not spell out directly but you feel in every money conversation they have.

what May does is spend money she does not really have on a weekend at the Botanical Garden which is a preserved natural space in the middle of the city and the only place you can go to be around actual trees and animals and soil. it costs a lot because of course it does. everything real costs a lot. the opening third of the book is mostly about the family arriving and settling in and Phillips uses it to establish the world through what May notices and what she worries about. i found this section completely absorbing even though almost nothing happens in it. Phillips writes the texture of anxiety and parenthood with the kind of precision that makes you feel seen rather than observed.

the second section is where things start to go wrong at the Garden and i want to stay vague about exactly what because the specifics are part of what makes it work. what i will say is that a Hum becomes important to the story in ways May did not expect and the relationship between her and this particular Hum is the most interesting thing in the book because it asks a question Phillips is clearly thinking about very seriously. if something can feel and respond to pain and express something that looks like longing does it matter whether that thing was born or built. May does not know how to answer that. neither do i. the book does not pretend to know either and i think that is the right position to take in 2024.

the climate stuff is woven in rather than announced. the heat is constant and the air is bad and the Garden exists because someone decided a long time ago to preserve it and now it is the only version of nature most city children have ever touched. Phillips does not write a speech about this. she just makes it the background against which everything else happens and the effect is that you feel the loss without being told to feel it.

the chapters are very short. two pages, sometimes three, sometimes less. this is a structural choice and it works better than i expected. each chapter ends on a small beat that pulls you forward and the rhythm of it gives the whole book the pacing of something much more plotted than it actually is. i read faster through this than through books twice its length and when i finished i was slightly surprised by how quickly it had gone.

the Botanical Garden section resolves in a way that left me wanting more of everything. more time with the Hum, more complication, more consequence. the book builds a world and a set of questions that feel enormous and then finds an ending that is quiet in a way that felt slightly too quiet for me personally. i do not think it is a flaw exactly. i think Phillips was being honest about the fact that the questions she is raising do not have clean endings in real life and she was not going to invent one. but i sat with a feeling of something unfinished when i put it down and i am still not entirely sure whether that was the intention or whether she ran out of road.
four stars. it is one of the better pieces of speculative fiction i have read in the last few years and if you have ever stood in a park in a city and felt quietly grateful that it was there you will understand immediately what this book is doing.