My impetus to jot down a novel arises partly from my anxieties. My anxieties (and maybe yours, too?) in recent times embrace the ever-increasing results of local weather change and ever-increasing advances in expertise, particularly in the realms of surveillance and synthetic intelligence. These considerations take most concrete type for me as the mom of two youngsters. I’m attempting to lift them for the world that lies forward, but it surely’s a future I can’t fairly envision.
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After I got down to write my novel Hum, I challenged myself to think about a near-future. A world much more addled by local weather change. A world the place the brakes are totally off when it comes to company surveillance of customers. A world inhabited by super-intelligent embodied robots (the “hums” of the title).
I additionally challenged myself to think about a household discovering its manner on this context. What does connection (to oneself, to at least one’s companion and youngsters, to the pure world) seem like when so many forces appear to be conspiring in opposition to it?
It turns into ever simpler to jot down dystopian fiction as our actuality tilts extra in that route. After I got down to write Hum, I felt a accountability to not solely evoke the dystopian but additionally to hunt one thing else. A attainable first step in the wrong way.
Reading books—each fiction and nonfiction—by writers who’ve tried to think about the future proved important in my writing course of. Along with offering essential factual and psychological info, these books gave me braveness to take a position about what’s to return, and to examine one household navigating an unsure world.
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Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
It simply so occurs that this ebook begins in the yr 2024. In a future degraded by local weather change and societal chaos, a violent raid forces Lauren Olamina (an empath who can really feel each the ache and pleasure of others) to depart the precarious however caring group the place her household lived.
In her troublesome journey northward, she bonds with different wayfarers and deepens her dedication to the new and expansive faith she has created, Earthseed (“God is Change”). It’s a reasonably hopeless scenario, but Lauren Olamina is a determine of hard-earned hope.
Arthur I. Miller, The Artist In The Machine: The World Of A.I.-Powered Creativity
Miller’s ebook gives a substitute for the outdated “the robots will destroy us all” trope. On this intricately researched ebook, Miller examines the constructive potential of human-A. I. inventive collaborations.
The Artist in the Machine, and the lecture Miller gave about it at Brooklyn Faculty in the fall of 2019, served as an antidote to my knee-jerk impulse to imagine that super-intelligent machines are inherently threatening to human creativity. Reading Miller’s work, and corresponding with him by e mail, helped me develop the character of the hum with nuance.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
On this future, rich households usually purchase AFs (Synthetic Associates) for his or her youngsters, who stay in isolation and are educated through screens. Klara, one such solar-powered android, is purchased as the companion to fourteen-year-old Josie.
I used to be intrigued by Ishiguro’s evocation of this embodied robotic embedded in a household, deeply engaged in conversations and relationships with people. Klara’s position in the household takes a darkish flip when Josie’s mom initiates a disturbing and questionable utilization of her daughter’s AF. This ebook illuminates the ambiguity of the human/robotic bond.
Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power Of Talk In A Digital Age
Turkle’s ebook enabled me to suppose extra deeply about the results of technological developments on relationships and on the household. Turkle interrogates the very language we use to speak about expertise. As an example, “cookies” are a cleverly benign time period—from childhood, we typically say “sure” when supplied a cookie, an intuition that maybe influences us subconsciously after we are invited to just accept cookies in our web travels.
When naming “hums,” “bunnies,” and “wooms” in my ebook, I used to be interested by the manner that such phrases can coloration our impressions of the applied sciences that encompass us.
I additionally thought of Reclaiming Dialog in the passage the place the hum encourages the two younger siblings, Lu and Sy, to make eye contact with one another; eye contact, as Turkle notes, serves as a pre-cursor to empathy. Resistance to the distancing results of tech could be so simple as ignoring your cellphone dinging in your pocket when somebody is chatting with you.
Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers
I learn this ebook after I had completed a draft of Hum, and I used to be fascinated to note the overlap in the considerations of the two books: maternal nervousness meets surveillance meets superior robots. On this good debut, a lady who—primarily based on a single mistake—is deemed an unfit mom should wrestle to show herself by mothering a robotic youngster.
Chan, with tender and painful perception, portrays Frida’s fraught emotional and authorized journey.
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
On this ebook, Wallace-Wells lays out a sequence of threats that local weather change poses to human life and high quality of life: “The local weather system that raised us, and raised every part we now know as human tradition and civilization, is now, like a mum or dad, lifeless.” These phrases echoed in my head as I used to be writing Hum.
In sections with titles corresponding to “Warmth Loss of life” and “Unbreathable Air,” Wallace-Wells gives grim warnings about our future, and illustrates the hazard of pretending that every part’s regular. A newly-minted mum or dad himself whereas writing the ebook, Wallace-Wells’ message shouldn’t be solely gloomy:
Local weather change means some bleak prospects for the a long time forward, however I don’t consider the applicable response to that problem is withdrawal, is give up. I believe it’s a must to do every part you’ll be able to to make the world accommodate dignified and flourishing life, reasonably than giving up early, earlier than the battle has been misplaced or gained.
Some animal details from Wallace-Wells—about the disrupted hibernation patterns of black bears, about plastic in the stomachs of seabird chicks—seem in Hum.
Samanta Schweblin, Little Eyes
In Little Eyes, cute little mechanical ambulatory pets (“kentuckis”) are additionally surveillance units that unveil, to strangers throughout the globe, the most non-public home and intimate moments of their house owners. The ebook progresses by means of a kaleidoscope of various owner-kentucki matchups, enabling Schweblin to richly discover the varied connections and disconnections facilitated by expertise.
Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
Foer discusses the ways in which the applied sciences supplied us by Huge Tech have an effect on our relationship with our personal ideas: “The tech corporations are destroying one thing treasured, which is the chance of contemplation.”
In Hum, my protagonist Could struggles to search out inside focus in her advertising-addled world. In the endnotes to Hum, I quote this passage from World With out Thoughts:
“Information’ is a cold phrase, however what it represents is hardly cold. It’s the report of our actions: what we learn, what we watch, the place we journey over the course of a day, what we buy, our correspondence, our search inquiries, the ideas we start to kind after which delete….The pc safety guru Bruce Schneier has written, “The accrued knowledge can in all probability paint a greater image of the way you spend your time, as a result of it doesn’t should depend on human reminiscence.” Information quantities to an understanding of customers, a portrait of our psyche.
In Hum, issues come up from the invasiveness of the knowledge collected about the household. I can solely hope that my ebook raises the query of what we’d do to nurture our relationship with our innermost ideas.
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Hum by Helen Phillips is obtainable through Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books.