Our Take
Helen Phillips has a gift for making the near future feel like next Tuesday, and Hum is her most quietly devastating book yet. Rather than leaning on dystopian spectacle, she zooms into one family's kitchen table, their arguments about screen time, their exhaustion, their love, and lets the technological unease seep in around the edges. It's speculative fiction as domestic drama, and that combination is what makes it hit so hard. Readers who loved the eerie parental anxiety of The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan or the surveillance dread of The Every by Dave Eggers will recognize the DNA here, though Phillips writes with more restraint and interiority than either. Her prose is clipped and precise, favoring accumulation over exposition, and she never over-explains her world. You're dropped into it the way May is dropped into her family's daily grind, and you adjust as you go. Thematically, this is a book about attention: who gets ours, who profits from it, and what we lose when we hand it over freely. It's also, tenderly, about marriage and parenting under pressure that no one signed up for. Fans of quiet, character-driven speculative fiction, think Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, will find a lot to sit with here. This is a book for readers who want their science fiction to feel like it's already begun.
