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(em português: sol2070.in/2024/12/livro-hum-helen-phillips/ )

“Hum” (2024, 272 pages), by Helen Phillips, is a dystopian fiction that is both suffocating and sensitive, about the difficulties of a woman and her family in a techno-surveillance society in ecological collapse.

Despite the futuristic setting, it could just as well be set today, with our current dependence on screens, corporate domination, ubiquitous digital ads, non-existent privacy, disastrous politics and the horror of environmental collapse. The difference is the absurd intensification of these factors, which includes the presence of advertising androids, called “Hum”.

But anyone expecting traditional science fiction may be disappointed, this is more like a backdrop for the drama — of marked internalization — of the protagonist May. Not that this is a flaw, I especially liked the psychological side, without seeing anything too special in the techno-dystopian part.

After losing her job to an AI, May undergoes facial microsurgery, in search of money, for an experiment on methods of obscuring surveillance cameras. Because of her longing for the lost natural world she experienced in childhood, she spends what she can't to take the two children and her husband for a few days in a kind of ecological dome. Unforeseen events, including a well-known internet phenomenon, exacerbate the protagonist's crisis.

It's not an easy read. There is a Kafkaesque tone, of a powerless person massacred by a vast automated system. This is compensated for by the tender moments of warm subtlety, and the character's feelings, without being cheesy. It's also worth it for the impressive ending.

I had read the author's previous acclaimed book, “The Need” (2020). A psychological horror similar to “Hum” in the internalization of a threatening crisis. Another point in common is that the genre of the story is just a backdrop for a powerful inner journey.

This novella is a quick heist-adjacent novel; the setup is that what should be a quick extraction of a scientist from Jackson's Whole (the black market anything goes planet) turns into a raid on Baron Ryoval's complex. This stretch of books in the series (from Cetaganda through Brothers in Arms, in my opinion) give the breadth of worldbuilding by exposing the reader to a new place that they've heard of before, but haven't seen directly. This story is mostly worldbuilding and action, and especially juxtaposed against The Borders of Infinity that comes up next, I think it feels like a much weaker book.

One thing I like about both this novella and the following one is that they're both complete stories on their own, but then build a lot of context for the two novels that follow. They're also not directly shoehorned into those novels, like The Weatherman was into The Vor Game.

(We also get a lot more Bel Thorne here too, even though I think Bel gets short shrift in the whole series.)

Not so long ago, Sally Strange pointed out to me Bujold's fascination with age gaps, and there is definitely some of that here. Taura is the monster at the heart of this titular Labyrinth, but is also a sixteen year old girl who has been modified to be a monstrous super soldier. I think this brief romance creates parallels for Taura to learn from Miles about being herself and not needing to be airquotes normal; however, this psychological road has already been walked by Miles before, and it doesn't feel like this relationship creates any growth for him. (And, honestly in the future, Miles thinks a lot more about Beatrice than we ever see him think about Taura.)