Helen Phillips on a mother's primal love, and the perfidy (and promise) of AI in her novel, Hum

Send us Fan MailIs there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child. Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain in her acclaimed 2020 novel, The Need, in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose urgent questions of what it means to be human, and how a family is capable of finding intimacy in a world mediated by technology. The maternal instinct is at the heart, too, of Fever Dream, a claustrophobic, propulsive horror story by the acclaimed Argentinian writer, Samanta Schweblin, in which a mother realizes that control is an illusion. Phillips other choice for this episode is ed Chiang’s  short story, Exhalation, from the collection of the same name, in which a robot-scientist discovers that the world is running out of energy.