By a lot of measures, the 2020s have not been easy.

We started the decade with the pandemic, which combined with our anxieties over climate change, economic inequality, and rising prices for pretty much everything.

The encroachment of technology into absolutely every aspect of life has reshaped our working lives, our relationships, and our cultural norms.

Parents are as invested as ever in trying to do what's best for their kids, but all this rapid change means they

can't recreate the conditions that worked when they were kids. So all this we know, and we're

dealing with it. But how would we manage if, say, a few years from now, it all got more intense?

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Helen Phillips' new novel is set somewhere in the possibly not too distant future, at a moment when the climate has deteriorated to the point that rather than Disneyland-style rides, the most desirable amusement park is just an urban oasis from the heat and filthy air, in which kids can sink their feet into real grass, bathed in clean water, and experience the minor miracle of picking and eating fruit right off the plant.

It is something Philip's protagonist May so desperately wants to give her own children that she undergoes an experimental procedure to literally change her own face. So she is no longer recognizable to facial recognition technology that surveils everyone all the time. May's family

needs the money she earns just to get by. She herself has lost her job to the AI she helped train,

but it's easy to relate to her desire, in fact, maybe her need to just do

something amazing with and for her husband and children. What follows in the book is at once a

dream and a nightmare come true. Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a

Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. Her new novel is called Hum.

Helen, welcome to think.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

One really fascinating thing about this story is that you put your character May into a world that is, I mean, unquestionably more bleak than the one we inhabit today, but also quite recognizable to anybody navigating the 2020s.

Like all the anxieties we have today just made real and turned up to 11.

Will you describe that world for us?

Yes, it is a near future, although I would say people have called the book prescient, and I must say I hope it isn't

prescient, but it is, that's not exactly what I want for it. But it is imagining about five minutes

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