This slim novel packs quite a punch, one I wasn't really expecting.
Speculative fiction can be hit or miss for me. The ones that miss tend to have extremely enticing premises, but when you look beneath the surface, there isn't much there. Hum is totally the opposite. I can't even explain what the premise is because it sounds so generic. The world is beset by climate change and capitalism gone awry, and a woman is trying to raise her kids and love them as best as she can in such a world. See, that doesn't really grab you, does it? And yet, there was so much more underneath the surface.
What makes this book so subversive isn't that the dystopian society presented in here is completely different from our current one. Rather, it's that it's almost the same. We need not look very far into the future—or even at all—to imagine that our lives could be like this. And that's what makes this so chilling.
Reading this, the disquiet and horror stole up on me slowly. At first, this seems like a dystopian world far from ours. In their world, capitalism runs amuck, constantly serving up ads and materialistic goods at the smallest sign of acquiesce. In their world, you must monitor air quality carefully and stay indoors during the bad days. In their world, everyone prefers the easy company of their "bunnies" and wooms to the complicated company of other humans. Except, oh wait...
And maybe part of the reason this hit me particularly hard is that I'm a mother to a young child, so I totally understand May's perspective. Her desire to disentangle her family from technology, all the while relying on its more useful parts, is a dilemma both familiar and unsolvable.
The only missed mark for me is perhaps the title of this book. I felt naming the story after the AI robots in here to be a bit of a misnomer. This story isn't about the hums at all. It's about us humans, and how far we are willing to go, how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice, in order to have everything we want at our technological fingertips.
Even though, like all speculative fiction, the world that's presented in here is just theoretical, it certainly feels much more than that. There's a prescience that is undeniable, and I suspect this story will continue to gnaw on me long after I'm done. It's definitely one of my most thought-provoking reads of the year.
Readaroo Rating: 4 stars
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