Hum: A Novel

“This book promises high stakes, and then fails to deliver.”

This book opens with high stakes, thrilling ones in fact: In a city populated by intelligent robots, the protagonist, May, a wife and mother, has lost her job to AI. Her family is afterward plunged into debt.

May opts to take the dangerous course of having her face surgically altered so that the city’s surveillance video cannot identify her as she pursues a desperate attempt to rectify her family’s debt. “Just playing with the 68 coordinates of your face print. Not visible to the human eye, but tricky for the system.”

Meanwhile, because her family is so intensely addicted to their digital devices, May splurges with what money she has on passes that allow them refuge inside the green Botanical Gardens full of streams, forests, and animals.

Her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their digital devices at home unintentionally creates greater danger. When her children’s lives come under threat, May has no choice but to trust a hum—one of the humanoid robots—and one with suspicious motives, as she races against a countdown clock in order to save her family.

The problem is that author Helen Philips does not resolve or pay off the high stakes she establishes at the start of the book. Rather, the reader is drawn through what seems an interminable succession of brief snippet chapters that intercut fast and swift with one another for the last two-thirds of the book.

The result is confusion: Who is talking, what are they talking about, what happened to the plot line? It’s all hard to follow. In the end the reader has no idea what this book was about. Whatever happened to the original story?

Phillips quotes Paracelsus on the book’s frontispiece: “Poison isn’t everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.” This is of course true of tech. And this book does nothing to clarify the issue.