In Hum: A Novel, the newest work by speculative fiction author Helen Phillips ’00, a near-future world is suffocated by climate change and inhabited by intelligent robots called “hums.” When a mother, May, loses her job to artificial intelligence, she signs up as a guinea pig in a high-tech surveillance experiment to earn extra income, only to find herself dependent on the supposedly benign hums to keep her family safe.
It comes as not much of a shock that Phillips, a mom of two whom the New York Times in its review labeled “one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction,” says, “When I am writing a novel, I begin with my anxieties.”
Hum explores the many of-the-moment worries shared by fiction writers, scientists, philosophers, and bloggers everywhere over AI and a world increasingly mediated by the generative intelligence hidden behind ever-present screens. Is it possible to encounter the “natural” world unaltered by technology? How can parents keep the bonds of family intact when faced with the constant intrusions of an artificial, digital information stream?
Says Phillips, “When I began writing Hum, I had these concerns about artificial intelligence and how it controls our lives in certain ways. I was concerned about climate change. I was concerned about surveillance, and the way that we have created a system where we’re all being watched much of the time. I was concerned about what kind of world we’re creating for the next generation—our children.”
So, “some light and fluffy topics,” she jokes.
But the writing process, Phillips continues, is actually the process of wrestling with those anxieties, coming to understand, and, hopefully, “emerging out the other end with a better grasp on them than when I entered.”
Just as with all of her works, Phillips did extensive technical reading and research and conducted interviews with numerous experts before sitting down to create Hum. Whether meeting with a sociologist who studies climate change or picking the brain of a friend who makes renewable fabric out of algae, Phillips would always start off by asking her subjects, “What are you worried about?”
Their ideas about where their fields are heading, for better or worse, informed the way she went on to imagine her alternate world—“In what ways is it an extension of our current world, and in what ways is it an exaggeration or a departure from our current world?”
Still, Phillips acknowledges, “It’s strange to be someone who writes speculative fiction today, because reality just catches up very quickly.” Mentioning the wildfires that swept through parts of Los Angeles in January 2025, she explains, “In just the time that it takes to write a book, things that seem apocalyptic can already have become reality.”
Finding the warmth
Phillips recognizes that literary handwringing, even the best kind, can only go so far. For all the background research and preparation, she grounds her novel in a story about a family—about a mother wanting to provide for her children. To the delight of readers and reviewers alike, the details Phillips has gathered through her process illuminate, rather than overwhelm, the lives of May and her family.
In one memorable scene, for example, May suspects that her husband’s text-message conversations with her consist solely of auto-generated replies; is there any such thing as “authentic” connection in a world of artificial intelligence? Anxiety about the state of the world becomes fuel for a meditation on motherhood and marriage, and the way that pervasive consumerism’s empty promises increasingly fail to answer some of our biggest questions.
When Phillips was completing her research, the second query she posed for experts—as a bookend to “What worries you?”—was “What gives you hope?” Their unanimous response, she reports, was “collective action”: in other words, people working and being together to create a world they want to live in.
In Hum, as in her own life, “We as parents can overthink it, but love and family are really about cherishing the human moments that bring us closer,” she says. “Each day, I try to make sure my children have interactions that remind them how good it feels to do the most simple human things: telling a joke at the dinner table, walking the dog around the neighborhood, sitting together in front of the fireplace (or, in my case, in a sort of Hum-like touch, a space heater that’s made to resemble a wood-burning stove!).”
As the novel reaches its end, Phillips adds, she’s “writing toward that kind of hope. Maybe not the big collective action the experts cited—but the little moments of closeness and understanding that begin to bring the family back together.”
Holding on to fun—or at the least, “an emerging feeling of warmth and humanity”—is a big part of Hum’s response to our near-future world, just as it is for Phillips herself, who says, “I had so much fun writing this book. There’s just a lot of laughter and delight that come from creating this kind of speculative world.”
Phillips mentions the hums’ constant stream of advertising as one recurring joke that inspired smiles as she was creating it. “You feel like you’re having this incredibly deep conversation, and then the hum will ask if you’re interested in buying some earrings. It’s a dark humor, where the sand just instantly shifts under your feet.”
There’s also fun to be found in the traveling life of an author, Phillips notes. “A lot of the concerns in this book felt very private to me when I was writing, but when I had the chance to talk to audiences about Hum, I realized, of course, that lots of people have the same worries and really want to talk to you about it.”
Heart, intellect, energy
The writing life—and her day job, teaching writing at Brooklyn College—certainly comes with its own rewards, acknowledges Phillips.
It was at Colorado Academy that she first discovered the richness and resonance of being in a room with others, thinking together about reading and writing, she says. “My teachers at CA—Anne Strobridge, Chip Lee, Angel Vigil, Betsey Coleman, Billy Bair, Jim Blanas—they taught me more than anyone else about creative writing. The act of sitting with students, talking really deeply about the emotional impact of a story or a poem or a piece of theater—there’s a very strong connection between the satisfaction I get from writing and that which I experience teaching.”
She continues, “How does this word choice change our experience of this sentence? What if it was this verb instead? What are we doing with our words to create an experience for a reader? These are the things I talk to my students about, and they are what I think about when I’m working on a book, too.”
Writing a book, says Phillips, “is one of the most challenging things I do, and it never gets easier.” Which is precisely the point, she implies—to be too comfortable means you’re probably not learning anything new.
“I feel like teaching is very similar to writing—and they are both very similar to being a parent. These endeavors all require a huge amount of heart and intellect and energy, in a good way.”
Phillips recalls one assignment given by Strobridge, the legendary Upper School English teacher. Students could write a piece of fiction about anything they wanted—as long as it wasn’t love or death. “As a teenager, I thought I knew a few things about those, of course,” Phillips recounts, “so I tried to write a story that stuck to the letter of her rule but defied it at the same time.”
The thrill of finding reward, even joy, in discomfort, limitation, and challenge, she observes, was the lesson she learned first from Strobridge. And as Phillips talks about the new novel on which she’s just begun work, she notes, “Once again, I have that feeling of, ‘Wait—how do you write a book?’ I don’t mean that as a bad thing; it’s a good feeling. It’s the feeling of, ‘I’m not sure I know what I’m doing, but I think I can figure it out.’”