I’m going to take a different approach to the books I review for Locus. I’m going to focus more on the thoughts that crossed my mind when reading and then reviewing the book. If you want to know my refined thoughts on the novel, please read the review when it appears online or, better yet, subscribe to Locus.

In short, I liked Hum. If you liked Helen Phillips’s previous novel, The Need, you should like this. Both books are about the stresses and anxieties of motherhood with a speculative twist. Here, we’re presented with a dystopia where the robotic “hums” have taken most of the jobs, and the planet is baking due to global warming. All of this is viewed from the perspective of a mother—May—trying to protect her family.

Inspired by Abigail Nussbaum, I spent a little more time—with emphasis on “little”—digging into the novel’s politics. We’re told not to review the book we wished had been written, but I couldn’t help but note that, like so much fiction these days, Hum is a novel obsessed with the decline of the middle class. As I say in my review, the shit that happens to May and her family, the lack of job and food security, and the threat of the family being split apart are issues that working-class folk and the impoverished are dealing with every single day. And that’s without climate change or an all-powerful AI. I do get it, though. We—and when I say we, I absolutely mean me, don’t think for a moment that I’m shielded from the criticism—only take notice of the shit hitting the fan when it’s the college-educated class selling body parts to make ends meet.

It’s unfair, though, to blame Helen Phillips for an issue that’s endemic across the publishing industry. I read Love on the Dole earlier this year, and it struck me that if Walter Greenwood were seeking to publish it today, he’d have next to no chance.

Obviously, I don’t read everything. Maybe there’s more blue-collar fiction out there that deals directly with the issues raised by Hum. If you know of anything, feel free to point it out. 

My Locus review will appear in the September 2024 edition.