Book Club Discussion: ‘Hum’ Made Us Skeptical of Parenthood—Not Just Because It’s in a Near-Future Dystopia

Nora: And then the titular hums are humanoid robots that basically do all sorts of service work. 

Lauren: And they just walk among everyone. 

Nora: Because they are humanoid, people interact with them in very human ways, and they also evoke human emotions. Like, in the beginning, May sees a hum get hit by a car that’s swerving to protect a human, and then sees the hum’s body being lifted into the like, robot-fixer van, and it’s very disturbing. And I thought that was a really interesting problem with the robots in the story: If you make them look cute or nice, humans will be much more likely to like them. Like, if those fucking Boston Dynamics robot police dogs were any cuter, I don’t think people would hate them as much. 

Lauren: I want to talk about how this book made me think, “Actually, I think I don’t want children.” I think definitively, at 1 a.m. last night, I made the decision: I would like to not have children.

Nora: These kids are so cute!

Lauren: They’re annoying! 

Nora: That’s so funny. I thought they were really cute. I mean, they’re not not annoying. They’re kids. Kids are annoying. 

Lauren: Sy just keeps, like, screaming about what different animals he is and being an asshole.

Nora: He’s 5 years old!

Lauren: But that’s the thing,5-year-olds are assholes. 

Even with Lou—who’s like, 8 or 9—being obsessed with the air quality and checking it every morning, that stressed me out. Your mom has no control over that. 

Nora: This was also why kids shouldn’t have phones! Kids shouldn’t know what air quality is.

Related, I want to talk about Jem (May’s husband). With him, there’s another con in the “having kids” column, because they just don’t have a relationship anymore. I know that’s always a trope—and clearly also their relationship is stressed because they have no money, because she’s been fired, and all he does is gig work. But like, then all the free time they have together is just kids-related, or they’re in their fucking wooms! It just bummed me out. I don’t know, I don’t have a cogent point…

Lauren: Even the way the story starts: May undergoes this slight face reconfiguration, so that she gets paid $10,000, because she needs money to help the family. And like, Jem is doing gig work, he’s working so hard around the clock just like, clearing mouse traps out of rich people’s homes. And he was not supportive of her doing this, which like looking at it: You’re gonna fuck with your face for $10,000? That feels crazy. But also, I don’t know, she got put out of work by a robot. She can’t find another role because it’s all automated now. She’s been out of work for months. So she agrees to this procedure which will pay her $10,000 free and clear, Jem is just kind of like, hmm. He’s not not supportive—

Nora: I think he’s not supportive!

Lauren: Yeah, like, not thankful or grateful.

Nora: In the sense of being on the side of the narrator, which I am for most of the book—being a parent is a sacrifice and it sucks that this could be the thing you have to do to keep a roof over your kids’ heads, but like, it’s a sacrifice.

Lauren: There was a line when May was trying to find the kids, and it goes, “She wasn’t sure she was alive. Her kids were her full life.” And I was like [retching sound]. Don’t want that. 

Nora: That’s so funny.

Lauren: And it made me think of—I mean, it was a Reddit thread so who knows how real it was—but it was a Reddit thread of parents who regret having kids, and a man wrote about him and his wife’s situation, and at one point he’s like, “My kids give me the most joy I’ve ever known in my life. I love them with everything, and I can’t imagine my life without them,” but he also said, “Before them, so many things brought me joy, and now only they bring me joy.” And I was like [retching sound again].

Nora: Jesus, Lauren. 

Lauren: Yeah, that could have been someone writing a short story and putting it on Reddit, I don’t know, but reading that line in the book made me think of that. And I was just like, fucking Christ.

There was a point where I thought something truly bad was going to happen to the kids, and she was just gonna kill herself or fully donate her body to science while she was still alive.

Nora: Yeah, it’s a dystopian novel in the near future, and it is also extremely about parenthood. And as someone who doesn’t have kids, but like, as a woman in her 30s—so we’ve gotta think about it, which I resent—there were a lot of moments that get really nitty-gritty into the emotions of parenthood. 

OK, ending. What are your thoughts?

Lauren: Number one, don’t finish this book at 1 a.m. I wish I had left 10 pages to read this morning. Because I don’t … hmm … is … Was it all a bad dream?

Nora: What?!

Lauren: Was she just like, in an anesthesia haze? OK, no? Maybe that’s just my 1 a.m. brain. 

Nora: OK so, she goes into her woom and like … ohhhh. Hmmm. 

Lauren: It’s the same as the beginning! But [reading], “This time she does not flinch.” What do you think happened??

Nora: OK, well I hope it wasn’t a dream, because I think that’s lame. You don’t need to write something as if it was a dream, if it’s already a near-future dystopia. 

Lauren: I don’t think she’s dreaming today, I think she’s dreaming in the future. I don’t even know if it’s a dream! But that last page, especially as the daughter was like, “Go to your woom; the hum told you to go to your woom”; and then the husband was like, “Just go look at your woom” … Almost like, I don’t know, family voices bringing her back to consciousness. 

I feel like I had the book, I got it, and then that last page, I was like, what the fuck?! 

Nora: I did read the epilogue—what you’re talking about, where it returns to the procedure room the book starts in—which is 175 words, or whatever, but to me, the ending was just the family sitting in a circle with this hum that has come to deliver them news.

Lauren: So you don’t see the epilogue as like the actual ending?

Nora: As I turned it over in my mind the last few days, I just like, didn’t think about the epilogue at all. It just kind of didn’t land for me. 

I read it as, she’s in her woom, and she’s seeing on the screen of the woom what she saw in the clinic room where she was getting the facial adjustment surgery.

Lauren: I think that too, but it’s like the grammar of that last line. 

Nora: [reading] “The needle enclosed her eye, and she did not flinch…”

Lauren: The paragraph before says “that small medical room, that hum hovering over her,” and then it’s “the needle” as if it’s like, happening in real time.

I don’t know!

Nora: OK, so say that’s the point, or say that’s what it is… Is it just kind of like, she’s not gonna get the facial surgery? Or, even though she’s had this dream, she’s not going to do anything differently? Or was this a cautionary tale—don’t go crazy when you have 10 grand suddenly? What’s the lesson? 

Lauren: It’s almost an opposite Christmas Carol. You don’t need to undergo this just to get the money; look at all the bad things that come from having this money. But that also feels like a weird lesson of the book. 

Nora: I thought it was interesting without the epilogue, which, fair enough, does seem relevant. But otherwise the ending … This thing has happened that’s a consequence of basically CPS getting called on May for taking her kids’ screens away, and they open up an investigation, and a hum is delivering news of its conclusion. And usually hums are very placid and they’re programmed in a certain way, but then this hum starts going kind of kooky, saying, “You can’t avoid the void. Statistically speaking, you are safe. … Focus on the moment you are in.” And then it sort of dies, in this circle with the family. And I was more focused on, what does it mean for this hum—because I would assume it is programmed to do this—to make this family feel a certain way? But what is that way and why? Is it to be like, you’ve had this really intense scare and now here are these weird platitudes to bring you back to reality or to ground you again? I was just like, I don’t care about the hums dying. 

I don’t know. The only part of the book I felt medium about was the end.  

Lauren: Are we supposed to believe that the hum has developed human ability? But like, why do we need that? 

Nora: Right. OK. So what’s your overall take? 

Lauren: Would recommend, because it’s a good, nerve-wracking binge, especially if you love dystopian fiction. It’s kind of uncanny valley, where it’s so close to what our future is, but it’s not our future yet. 

Nora: I would definitely agree. I think it is a really well-thought-out world in which these characters exist. In terms of speculative fiction, this is absolutely very grounded speculation. And it made me want to throw my phone and my laptop into the sea and move to the mountains and never interact with technology—

Lauren: —and never have children. 

Nora: Well, I could have children in the mountains if they don’t interact with technology. 

Lauren: Fair. 

Nora: It also really fit into—there’s such a trend in tech-adjacent media now about the “enshittification” crisis and how everything is just getting shittier and the internet is impossible to use now because it’s just AI responses to questions you didn’t ask, and your Instagram and Tiktok algorithms are just advertisements now. I think that the best thing about this book, and the thing that I would really recommend it for, is that it seems like what happens in this novel is the natural progression—how this technology that’s supposed to make our lives better just makes everything so much more annoying and irritating and in that way, I feel like everyone should read it to get the awareness that the services we’re using are not a net good for the world!

Lauren: Yeah, I agree with that.

Nora: I’ve already been kind of tech-skeptical the last couple of months, and this made me even more so. 

But anyway, thanks, Helen Phillips, good novel.