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

Is 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.  

Transcript

The following interview, recorded for the One Grand Books podcast, Shelf Life, has been edited for concision and clarity.

Hicklin: Is 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 brilliantly in her last novel, The Need, in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelgänger.

Now she returns to the theme of maternal love with Hum, a novel set in a near future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose urgent questions: what it means to be human, and how a family might be capable of finding intimacy in a world mediated by technology. Phillips has said, “I fear that solitude is increasingly an illusion, thanks to surveillance, social media, et cetera. And I think people desperately need solitude in order to have freedom and self-knowledge.”

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. Fever Dream is one of two stories that Phillips has chosen to discuss for this episode of Shelf Life. The other is Ted 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. Helen Phillips, welcome to Shelf Life.

Phillips: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be with you.

Hicklin: We’ve spoken on and off for some time; I’ve been a fan of yours ever since stumbling on your short stories in Some Possible Solutions. I quoted you [in my introduction] saying you worried that solitude is increasingly an illusion. As someone who seems prolific, I wonder how you ensure you have the solitude you need in order to write.

Phillips: That’s a good question, and I think it’s something that a lot of writers struggle with now, as well as anyone trying to do something that requires focused and creative work. Each day I set an amount of time I’m going to write – whether it’s one hour, two hours, or if I’m lucky, four hours – and set a timer, and once it starts, I don’t allow myself to look at anything except the Word document I’m in. It’s very simple, but somehow that magic of the timer helps me with this issue of focus.

Hicklin: Are you allowed to get up in the midst of that period of time to make yourself a cup of coffee? 

Phillips: Yes, physical activities are permissible – stretching, standing, looking out the window. Mainly what I’m protecting myself from is the Internet.

Hicklin: We live in a world where people really expect you to be available almost 24/7. For a writer, that must be a real challenge at times.

Phillips: Yes, well, I think the people closest to me, when I’m slow to respond to their texts, know I’m probably writing at that time. And I will, I promise, get back to them as soon as I can. Hopefully they aren’t all secretly enraged at me.

Hicklin: One of the great themes of your new novel, Hum, involves a mother’s desire for her children to be less enthralled to their devices – to have more human interaction, and to engage with their surroundings and with nature. But it turns out that May’s rejection of technology (May is the mother of two children in this wonderful novel) comes at a price. She takes her family to the Botanic Gardens, which is a sort of Willy Wonka-ish fantasy of nature – perhaps a little like an actual Botanic Gardens, but more heightened, maybe more artificial. They go there without their devices, and they’re almost immediately bereft. Much as we might wish to be less dependent on AI, there’s a sense we’ve passed the point of no return. We can’t reject technology – but can we develop a more compassionate relationship with it? Was that one of the questions you were determined to raise in this book?

Phillips: I’m so glad you’ve brought that up, because I will turn your attention to the epigraph of the book, which is from Paracelsus, who was an alchemist and physician in the 1400s. The quote is: “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.” 

I put that as the epigraph because it really captures something that I feel about technology: there are too many benefits and we’re too entwined with it to reject it fully. That wouldn’t even be possible. And the question is, how do we dose all of these technologies that are constantly pouring down on us in a way that enables us to maintain our humanity, and use them as the incredible tools that they are, rather than being beholden to them?

Hicklin: I think this is a good moment to reintroduce the title of the novel, Hum. “Hum” also refers to an artificial intelligence machine/robot/something [in the world of the book]. It has a kind of human resemblance, in that it has these silvery metallic limbs. And it has a highly developed intelligence, and even an emotional intelligence. I wonder if you can tell me when the idea of these “hums” first came into your mind?

Phillips: I’ll begin by saying that as soon as I realized that these robot beings in my book would be called hums, I knew that I wanted to have the title be Hum. And one reason I love that title is because of the duality it encapsulates. On the one hand, “hum” refers to the constant buzz of our devices and of the Internet and of social media, even traffic, all of these machines we’ve created that are constantly humming around us and that it’s hard to ever silence. But at the same time, humming is a beautiful thing. You might hum while you’re doing the dishes. You might hum a lullaby to your child. Hum is also connected to the sacred sound Om. So, I wanted that duality – that negativity and positivity, the sinister quality and the almost divine quality – to be present in the book, and very much in the character of the hums.

Hicklin: One of the things I found so beautiful about the world you’ve created in Hum is how it’s both presently relatable and of the future. We understand a world in which our technology is constantly trying to sell us things, upsell us on things; we understand a world in which climate change has made swaths of the globe less habitable. And at the same time, the novel’s world is other to the one we actually reside in. How tricky was that balancing act, finding something at once lived and real, but also completely speculative?

Phillips: Well, I was fascinated when I learned that Margaret Atwood famously said everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has some basis in reality, and in our known society. So, in that book, you have a situation that seems quite outlandish, but actually has a lot of basis in known reality. I thought of that when I was working on Hum, and the book actually has a section of endnotes because of all of the research I did about our current world as I was working on it. The book is certainly seeded from our present reality. Yet, I also did want to write a book that was different from our known world, that was speculative – one reviewer said it was set “five minutes in the future.” But I wanted to write a contrary reality, because I feel that by going a little bit away from the known world, we can then defamiliarize the situation that we’re in and re-engage with it anew. 

Hicklin: You mentioned there the 12 pages of endnotes, which is unusual for a novel. It really does situate Hum in these real concerns about technology and climate change. Was that the thing that came first – the interest in these issues? Or was it a character, was it a mood, was it the story itself?

Phillips: The first thing that comes to me, for my novels, usually is a series of images. That’s often my starting place. But I’ll tell one anecdote that I recall as being quite important in developing the central concerns of the book: One day, some years ago, I was walking home from work and the thought crossed my mind that I ought to buy new dishrags. And when I arrived home, I opened my computer, and dishrags were immediately advertised to me. It felt as though my mind had been read, and surely the algorithm had somehow figured it out – and I believe I went ahead and ordered the dishrags, because it’s just dishrags. But it felt uneasy to me, and I thought, “Okay, for dishrags it’s fine” – but what if you extrapolate to a more extreme version of this kind of mind reading? And that is the situation that I put my protagonist in.

Hicklin: You do it in a way that’s often very funny. May is constantly being targeted by an ad for rejuvenating face cream – that’s very much the world of Instagram. In my Instagram feed now, for every three or four posts that are genuine, I have a post that is a product. And the number of times I actually start clicking into that product is astonishing. You really captured that. 

There’s another moment in which May worries her husband is relying on auto-texts to communicate real emotion. I feel this humor comes from a real, wry observation of our actual society, our actual life. I have a vision of you just jotting these things down in a notepad all the time.

Phillips: Yes! Because the book has elements of a dark dystopia, that gets a decent amount of air time. But it’s very important to me when people note that it’s also a funny book. That was quite important to me when I was writing. I think a lot of the humor, as in the instances you’ve indicated, arises from those moments where we’ve been subjected to advertising and felt ourselves being compelled by that. The hum will, in the middle of what appears to be a deep conversation, suddenly say something like, “Would you like to buy these earrings?” And it’s quite startling, you realize, that the conversation was not what it seemed, that there is an ulterior motive. But if you can pay a good amount of money, then the hums don’t advertise to you. And when that happens, they become capable of a much deeper level of conversation. And that is also important in the book – that, beyond the advertising, they do have capacities for wisdom that can be obscured when they are still subjected to the advertising agenda.

Hicklin: Another one of May’s misadventures is that she agrees to be a guinea pig, wherein she has her face altered so that she can escape detection by the surveillance cameras. But she’s really being used to refine the technology’s ability to read faces. I love your description in the opening chapter of a hum, because it’s very clear that they can do things better than human beings. And that is the dichotomy of technology, right? We want to have human interactions and relationships, but at the same time, technology can often compensate for imperfections in the world – can make flying safer, can make dental treatment better, can make cars more efficient. It seems to me that is at the root of the conflict and the contradiction we’re constantly having to live with: wanting to resist the dehumanizing aspects of technology, while also embracing its potential for improving our lives.

Phillips: Yes. I wouldn’t say that mine is an anti-technology book. It’s really grappling with this fascinating and sometimes terrifying gray area we’re in, where our technologies are so beneficial to us, but also detrimental to us. And I hope the book adds to a conversation about how we can introduce these technologies and maintain our humanity, introduce these technologies and maintain our empathy, how we can have machines surrounding us and helping us while also nurturing the things that make us human and that are precious about being human. 

Hicklin: Right. May of course undertakes this procedure because she’s desperate for money – she doesn’t have a job – and she gets paid very handsomely for being a guinea pig. And then, on her way home, she spends a substantial chunk of that money on three nights for her family at the Botanic Gardens. Where did you get the idea for the Botanic Gardens from?

Phillips: I mentioned that my books often begin with images, and one of the very early images for the book was a fertile green space in the middle of an urban space. That’s partly because I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, but now I’m a city dweller in Brooklyn, and the green spaces in Brooklyn – like Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Greenwood Cemetery – take on such a sacred quality because they’re in the midst of a city. I wanted to try to evoke on the page that particular kind of beauty and refuge of these vast green spaces in the midst of a lot of concrete. 

The Botanic Gardens are indeed so important to her to share with her family, that she makes what is a pretty foolish financial decision in order to give them access to this. But she feels that if she is able to give them what she thinks will be unbridled nature, that it will restore her family in a way that feels very valuable to her – so valuable to her that she’s willing to squander money on it. She does have this feeling – and it’s colored by nostalgia, certainly – that if she were able to connect with nature and have her children connect with nature, everything would be fine. But she is a little naive to think that there’s a quick fix for the world she lives in.

Hicklin: New York’s green spaces, of course, took on even more importance during the pandemic. You were about 50 pages into Hum when lockdown began. How did that impact the writing of it?

Phillips: It’s impossible to separate the writing of Hum from the pandemic, because as you say, I was 50 pages in and finding momentum with it, and then it all came to a screeching halt in March of 2020 as our lives did, for so many of us. Though the plot and characters of Hum were in place before then, the pandemic definitely added an emotional intensity that became very important and very present. It wouldn’t be the book it is without the pandemic, which I think intensified some of the feelings of claustrophobia, some of the desire for that freedom of that green space, some of May’s anxiety related to her children. Those feelings were all intensified by the pandemic.

Hicklin: I introduced you as the author of The Need, which was your last novel. That was often advertised as a horror. Obviously it has elements of a horror story – it is a terrifying read. In the book, Molly, a mother, becomes increasingly dislocated from her reality, imagining a parallel universe in which another version of her has lost her children to an act of terror. There’s a disquieting sense, all the way through, of the really primal fear a mother has for her children’s security. That also is part of Hum: the need of a mother to put her children first, protect her children, at all costs. I wonder if you can talk about that as a kind of compulsion for you, in terms of your writing.

Phillips: Yes, it does seem to be a compulsion, doesn’t it?

Hicklin: Well, there’s a wonderful story in [your short story collection] Some Possible Solutions, in which a mother starts imagining or seeing doppelgängers of herself and her children everywhere. So, I think this motif of a mother and her relationship to her children is something that is very pronounced in your work.

Phillips: Yes, and you could even say in Hum that May becomes a doppelgänger of herself, because she has her face altered. So she is at once herself and not herself. Speculative fiction gives me the ability to literalize this – that there are literally doppelgängers, there are literally these doubles. But speaking metaphorically, that is also an exploration of self and selfhood and the ways we can contain within ourselves multiple contradictory identities. 

As far as the theme of this deep maternal love, a love that’s so sublime and so intense and contains within it elements of anxiety and fear – it’s something that, when I had children, I was surprised that I hadn’t read more about. This is not an uncommon experience, the experience of motherhood – of parenthood more broadly – and the love that is so fierce, so primal, so ecstatic, and so frightening, and powerful. It seemed like a topic very worthy of more exploration in fiction. 

Also, on a personal note, when my first child was six weeks old, my older sister died. And so right as I was beginning this epic love journey with my own child, I was also grieving my sister and watching my parents mourn their firstborn daughter as I was celebrating my firstborn daughter. That relationship between birth and death characterized my early months of motherhood and is probably something I will be exploring in my writing for the rest of my life.

Hicklin: In that way, is your sister very much present in your fiction? Is her spirit sort of animating some of your themes?

Phillips: Very much so. Always. That was 12 years ago, but it still feels extremely raw and important to me.

Hicklin: Your children are obviously in here, too, if transformed on the page. One of the things I’m not going to be the first to comment on is the brilliant way you incorporate the language of children, the phrases that they come up with, the patterns of their conversations – it’s suffused through Hum, and it was, also, through The Need. Are your children stories for you?

Phillips: The book is dedicated to my children. So much of the inspiration for this book derives from thinking about the future that awaits them, wanting it to be a good one, and trying to think through by way of a cautionary tale (that hopefully also offers moments of hope) how the future could go better than it sometimes seems slated to go. 

But in terms of the voices of children on the page, when I use a direct quote from my children—and I don’t very much—I ask their permission. I would also say more broadly that, having children, one thing that surprised me among millions of other things is just how complicated they are from such a young age. They are as complicated as adults. In fiction, children can come off as one dimensional. And it was quite important to me, both in The Need and Hum, to avoid that – to really evoke a child, as I would an adult character. So really finding ways to take them seriously on the page, to capture their vulnerability, their sense of humor, their rage, their delight. All of it. I really wanted that to be there. 

I also didn’t want them to come off as precious. I wanted them to be obnoxious sometimes. I wanted them to surprise the reader sometimes. I’m looking for as much complexity in my child characters as in my adult characters, and that is because as a parent of children I live with that complexity.

Hicklin: I’m curious how you would characterize yourself as a child. 

Phillips: Well, I knew from the age of six, which was when I first was able to physically write a story, that I wanted to be a writer. I’m lucky that I’ve had that sense of vocation from a very young age. I grew up in the mountains west of Denver, and you could leave my childhood home and walk right into the forests for hours. That home isn’t a place that is dangerous for wildfires and has mercifully been spared and hopefully will continue to be spared from wildfires. 

I lost all of my hair at the age of 11 due to the autoimmune condition alopecia, and it was a bit after that, when I was around 13, that I made the New Year’s resolution to write a poem every day. And I kept that resolution for 8 years. Because I wrote a lot of –

Hicklin: That’s a lot of poems!

Phillips: It’s a lot of poems, it’s too many. My parents said, “Should we put all these old poetry journals in a fireproof box?” And I said, “Those we don’t need to worry about. There are plenty of things in the house I would worry about before my old poetry journals.” 

But writing served then, as it did now, as a way for me to process what was quite disturbing to me at the time, which was being a bald woman, a bald young woman in our society. And just as now I process other anxieties, about the future and climate change and artificial intelligence, through my writing, so that has been a part of my life for a long time.

Hicklin: And I’m imagining you, walking through the woods as a—maybe not as a six-year-old, a little older perhaps. Were you inventing stories in your head all that time? Were you imagining stories?

Phillips: Yes, I don’t know what thinking is except imagining stories. It feels very organic.

Hicklin: It’s interesting that you were a storyteller before you lost your hair. Because one thing about a trauma like that is that’s when writing can kick in as a way to interrogate the world around you, and interrogate your own feelings. But you already had the tools at that point. Did you deal with that experience of having alopecia and losing your hair as a writer? Was it something that you tackled in journals, or in short stories?

Phillips: Yes, it appeared in my writing in lots of different forms—but perhaps I had come to writing even before I lost my hair because there was another challenge in my household, which was that my beloved older sister had the severe neurological disorder Rett Syndrome. That was very difficult for my parents, and I saw them struggle with that. So I think that writing, even at age six, was serving as a place of invention and imagination and healing.

Hicklin: What were you reading as a child? 

Phillips: The first book of poetry I ever read cover to cover was Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems. A family friend gave me a beautiful edition of that, So I would read an Emily Dickinson poem, and then write a poem of my own. At that age, as I was getting interested in poetry, I was also reading a lot of Pablo Neruda and E. E. Cummings. Those were very liberating voices for me. 

The first novel that I remember really blowing my mind was A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I had never read anything like it, and I was thrilled and astonished that a novel could take that form. And though magical realism is a specific term that I wouldn’t apply to my own work, certainly magical realist writing gave me permission to play around with world building in my work as I still do now.

Hicklin: That’s a nice segue, in a sense, to Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, the novel you’ve chosen as anong your favorites. Schweblin seems to write in a style perhaps characteristic of writers from South America – this uncanny space between the real and the imagined. When did you first encounter Fever Dream, and why did it resonate so strongly with you?

Phillips: I read Fever Dream before it was published, because I had been asked to blurb it by the editor. I was going to do an event in New Jersey, and I thought, okay, I’ll take this along, it’s a slim volume. I read the entire book in that one train ride, and it is, and remains, one of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a physical, visceral reaction to a book. When I got off the train I felt like I had had a physiological experience. It’s just such an intense book, and yes, there’s horror in it, but even more so—and I think what spoke to me the most—was just the evocation of the maternal love, the parental love I was speaking about before, this sublime, forceful, sometimes anxiety-producing, sometimes ecstatic love that the mother has for the daughter in the book. 

The original title of the book in Spanish is Distancia de Rescate, which means Rescue Distance. In English, the title is Fever Dream, but the concept of “rescue distance” is very important in the book. The mother is always attuned to the distance between her and her daughter—is  she close enough to save her if anything happened? And that constant low buzzing, of, “Okay, where is my child, and will I be there if they need me?” felt so relatable to me at that time. I had two young little children, babies at that time, and I felt like, “Ah, here is this feeling I’ve been feeling, and I’ve been wondering if anyone else knows what I’m talking about, and here I see it on the page.” So it was a sublime experience to read this book.

Hicklin: It was long listed for the International Man Booker Prize, and a finalist for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize, so definitely has its supporters and fans. It’s very short, as you pointed out, quite easy to read in a single day—which I think is probably the best way to do it, because it’s a little claustrophobic. You can’t help but move through it fast; you almost feel as if there’s somebody chasing you through this book. And what’s chasing you is, I think, the dread of the conclusion, of where we’re going, of what we’re going to discover.

And the question of what we discover is also a question for the main character, Amanda. It opens in a very unusual way: we’re in a hospital bed, and Amanda is talking, though we can’t quite tell if she’s talking in real time or in our head, to David—David is a young boy whose story we discover through the course of this book. 

It took me a while to find my equilibrium—I wasn’t quite sure where I was, for a good ten, twenty pages. Was that your experience, or did you immediately feel, “I know where I’m going?”

Phillips: I, too, found it disorienting. The opening of the book is challenging to understand—what the circumstance is, who David is, why she’s in the hospital bed. So you could, I suppose, have the instinct to put it down. But those questions were animating enough for me that I continued reading. And then you hit a point where you understand this question-and-answer format, the call and response, of these two central characters. Then it becomes very effortless to read. But it is, I think intentionally so, disorienting in the beginning. A lot of events in the story are disorienting, and hard to tell if they’re happening in reality or just in someone’s mind. I think that’s the source of the English title, Fever Dream, though I have a personal preference for Rescue Distance.

Hicklin: As you say, “rescue distance” is a calculation of how long it would take to save a child in an emergency—“Am I close enough?” And rescue distance is important in this context, too, because of the other character, David, whose mother, Carla, isn’t close enough to rescue him at a certain point. And the story that we get is about a changeling, in a sense. David is exposed to toxic waste, and his mother, unable to take him to a doctor, takes him instead to a psychic, who separates his soul—there’s a transmigration of souls that happens. It’s a complicated plot twist: his soul is transmigrated, and then he is not the son Carla recognizes anymore; he’s essentially somebody else, a monster in a child’s disguise. Is that how you read it?

Phillips: Yes, but I think you can question exactly what’s happening, and even if Carla is a reliable narrator. We get many different layers of narration in the book. One thing I love about it, among many things, is that what the book is about or mostly about remains elusive to me, although I see many rich possibilities. One is that it is largely a book about climate change. Another possibility is that this is a book about maternal love and what happens to maternal love when your child isn’t healthy, what happens to maternal love when something goes wrong with your child. This is obviously close to my heart because, as I mentioned earlier, I grew up with a handicapped sibling, and there are handicapped children in this book. I think it also could be a book about storytelling as a combative act. You have these multiple narrators who are having different understandings of events and different priorities for events. All of these are potential focal points for the book, all of them are in there, but I appreciate the feeling as I read that I’m not quite sure what’s most important. Indeed, David keeps saying to Amanda, “You have to focus on what’s important. Keep your eye on what’s important.” And Amanda is having trouble understanding what’s important, which I think mirrors the reader’s experience. So this book, for me, operates on many different levels.

Hicklin: I’m interested in that term, storytelling as a combative act. What does that mean for you? What is a combative act of storytelling?

Phillips: In the very specific context of this book, Amanda will begin to tell a story, or take an angle on something, and David will correct her—“No, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. You’re doing the wrong thing. That’s not what’s important.” And then Carla will tell a version of the story, and David will contradict it. Different people are trying to control or evoke or express the narrative, and it’s not a straightforward thing to do—so maybe this is a broader comment about storytelling, that it is a powerful act. You claim power when you do it, and others can want to tell the same story in a different way.

Hicklin: Interesting, almost a metaphor for the craft of writing itself: what is the story? What is important? What is not important? And that propels this very short novel. 

Schweblin is primarily a short story writer or is well-known as a short story writer. You are, too. Your career is grounded in very short stories and flash fiction. She has said novels happen for her when a short story does not completely work—or, in her words, a “short story failure.” How do you decide, Helen, when a story needs to be a novel?

Phillips: The work or the idea always comes to me—I know before I start it, whether it’s a story or a novel. I’ve never had that conflict. A story idea always feels to me like a one-off, a concept, one image I’m going to evoke. And a novel always feels like a huge weaving I can see all these different strands of, that will come together. So I think it’s fascinating that Schweblin describes her novels as failed stories. That’s definitely not my experience. I either have an idea that has a thousand different points of entry, and then I know it’s a novel, or I have an idea that’s a more straightforward arrow, shooting forth, of what it will be. And that’s a short story. 

Hicklin: We’re talking about two among your favorite reads. One of those is Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin. The other is the short story Exhalation, from Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation. I gave you a heads up that I felt a little differently about Exhalation than the way I felt about Fever Dream. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. For me, it hit all my anxieties about my relationship to science fiction. I was never that kid that was drawn to science fiction, and as an adult, I’ve generally skirted it. Tell me why I should have liked it more. 

Phillips:  I understand what you’re saying, so let me share why I love this story so much. One thing that is potentially alienating to a reader of this book is the language, which is, in my opinion, quite technical and formal—even cold, I would say. But that formal, cold, technical language is being used to get at a longing that is so passionate, so human, so full of yearning and care—which is where we arrive by the end of this book. 

This is set in an alternate reality where people are robots, and in order to survive, each day they have to refill their two lung tanks with tubes of argon. And if they don’t, they will die. But the narrator—and as we learn at the end of the story, the piece is actually a letter to a person of the future—comes to understand that the argon is going to equalize, and then, they will no longer be able to survive. Their survival is predicated on the movement of air, and if all the air pressure is the same, then you can’t have movement, so you can’t have memory or thought.

It sounds technical, but to me, it is a metaphor for climate change. the protagonist at one point says, “Every air that I breathe, I’m causing the equilibrium to happen. And once the equilibrium happens, we will no longer be able to survive.” So this feeling of being deeply implicated in your usage of your planet, and that it will lead to your demise—that’s a feeling I certainly have as a person who consumes energy on our planet. So I love it for being about climate change. It defamiliarizes our situation and enables us to reapproach it anew, which is, as I said, something I really wanted to do in Hum. And though the narrator is stiff and formal, I came to feel very tenderly towards them. 

I think that’s because the story ends with such a soaring climax that would be hard to earn in a lesser work. But I will read from the ending, if you don’t mind. So, after many pages of technical and formal and scientific language, this is the narrator directly addressing the reader, or the person who will find this document: 

“I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s lifespan is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led – none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium, emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.” 

So after the technical language of much of it, that feels like such a change in emotion, and feels so rich, and very much to be speaking about our own world and our own evolution.

Hicklin: You mentioned this particular voice, and how that changes or at least becomes a little less technical by the end. That’s something we might, as a reader, take for granted. You’re a writer. I’m curious what you’re noting about the writer’s craft, about Ted Chiang’s approach, as a peer who may be interested in his structure.

Phillips: One thing that delights me in that story is that I do actually feel there is embedded in there a creative manifesto of sorts. The narrator seems to me very much like a stand-in for an artist. I’ll read again from close to the end, where the narrator writes: “Through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way, I live again through you.” 

When you convey a creative vision to someone else, it then lives in them and you then live in them. Maybe it sounds kind of creepy when I put it that way, but this idea of conveying your artistic vision to someone else—it’s a form of, almost, the deepest connection you can have with someone else. That’s one thing I think he’s doing there. 

At one point in this story, it should be mentioned, the protagonist dissects his own brain. And it’s this really meticulously written scene, and by the end, all the parts of his brain are oriented around the room—he is a robot, so it’s all these mechanical parts of his brain—as though it’s exploding. It’s a controlled explosion, but you see all the brain, everywhere. And that scene is written with such technical precision that as I was reading it, I became hyper aware of my own brain and my own cognition and my own wheels turning. And so that’s another thing he does for me in that story: the prose takes me so long to absorb that it makes me self-conscious, in a positive way, about my own thought processes.

Hicklin: We’re told the brain is so hard to replicate it has to be made out of gold. When the brain explodes, it’s an explosion of gold, right? It’s a very beautiful image, actually.

Phillips: It is beautiful, yes.

Hicklin: Helen Phillips, thank you so much for being a guest on Shelf Life. I’m so glad we were able to find time to do this.

Phillips: Truly my pleasure. Thank you so much, Aaron.