Author Q&A
In this series of Q&As, the Climate Fiction Prize talks to each of the shortlisted writers about all things climate, fiction and the inspiration behind their novel.
- How would you summarise your book in one sentence?
After May loses her job to artificial intelligence, she earns money to support her family by becoming a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it can’t be recognized by surveillance; she then splurges on passes to take her children and husband to the Botanical Garden, the one remaining green area in her city of the future, but when things go awry, she has to put her trust in a superintelligent robot—a ‘hum’—of uncertain motives.
- What inspired you to write this story?
One early seed of inspiration: I was walking home from work when the thought idly crossed my mind that I need to buy new dishrags. When I got home and opened my computer, dishrags were immediately advertised to me. I felt as though my
private thoughts had been violated. I also went ahead and bought the dishrags. But that eerie feeling stuck with me, and I started to think about what worst-case scenarios might arise from surveillance by an algorithm.
- Did you set out to write a story about climate or did those themes develop through the writing process?
For better or worse, I draw a great deal of inspiration from my anxiety. When I was setting out to write Hum, I was anxious about climate change, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the future we’re creating for our children. I did a lot of research on those topics when I was writing the book. That research enabled me to engage with the anxiety and transform it into a narrative.
- What’s one book you think readers should pick up after they finish your novel?
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (and every other book listed in the endnotes of Hum).
- Is there a book (or film/TV series/play) that made you see the climate crisis differently?
The novel Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin captures the insidious horror of environmental toxicity more viscerally than anything else I’ve ever read, and shows one mother’s inability to protect her child in the face of it. And Ted Chiang’s story “Exhalation” brilliantly expresses—by way of an otherworldly premise—how we are all implicated in climate change.
- What would you say to a reader looking for a sense of hope in turbulent times?
I recently read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book H is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z (with exquisite illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook). I experienced both hope and despair as I read it, but under D for DESPAIR, Kolbert writes “Despair is unproductive.” And under Y for YOU, she quotes Greta Thunberg saying, “You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come … You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.” Hope needs to be an active endeavor. I think about that a lot—how to pursue hope through action.
- How do you think storytelling can shape our response to the climate crisis and our sense of what future is possible?
Imagination is essential. We need stories to evoke possible futures so that we can work toward them or work to avoid them. I return often to Ursula K. Le Guin’s words in her essay “ ‘A War Without End’ ”: “To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.”
- What’s the one piece of advice you would give to a writer facing a blank page?
When I’m facing a blank page, there’s nothing I find more bracing than Isak Dinesen’s words: “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
- Hum paints the image of a future where inequality, tech surveillance andenvironmental decline reach what feel like feverish points. Why was it important to you to depict and weave these themes alongside each other?
The world of Hum is seeded in our current reality, where inequality, tech surveillance, and environmental decline are already very much present, and very much interconnected. To write an imagined future, I envisioned a more extreme version of all of the above.