Climate Fiction prize spotlights surveillance-fueled anxiety

Hum wins – Helen Phillips’s near-future novel Hum—about a mother trying to protect her children in a broiling metropolis of superintelligent “hums”—won the Climate Fiction prize, bringing sharp attention to how climate crisis and surveillance collide with inequality and

The alarm didn’t come from a siren. In Helen Phillips’s Hum, it arrives through the quiet machinery of daily routines—through an algorithm that seems to know what you want before you even say it out loud.

Phillips’s novel has now won this year’s Climate Fiction prize, supported by Climate Spring and worth £10,000. The award is meant to recognise “storytelling that engages with the realities of climate change”. In 2025, the prize went to Abi Daré for And So I Roar. This year. Hum beat shortlisted titles including Susanna Kwan’s future San Francisco where the streets are rivers. Awake in the Floating City. and Endling. Maria Reva’s story of the journey of a very endangered snail.

The book’s setting is close enough to feel plausible: an over-heated near-future metropolis peopled by superintelligent robots known as hums “living” alongside humans. At the centre is May, a mother of two. Her life narrows to one urgent task—get her children away from addictive devices—so she spends money she doesn’t have on a trip to an oasis of nature in the heart of the city.

Judges leaned hard into what Phillips is really writing about. Climate scientist Friederike Otto. professor in climate science at Imperial College London. said Hum “tackles the central reason that nothing is done about the climate crisis – privilege. It destroys your opportunities and human rights”. Fellow judge Jessie Greengrass. a novelist. described the book as “a book about what to do with your anxiety when there’s no right thing. or when all choices have consequences that seem to make things worse”.

That framing lands because Phillips makes the threats feel domestic. She built Hum out of an experience that started as something small and private: years ago. she was walking home and thought she needed to buy new dish rags. When she got home, the ads appeared immediately on her computer. She remembers the “eerie” certainty of it—how the algorithm seemed to know the thought she hadn’t shared.

From there. the novel’s central tension takes shape: an extreme version of algorithmic surveillance. and the damage it can do when it meets inequality. Phillips speaks about her protagonist in the same terms—close to the fear most people carry, but pushed further ahead. A line she says “really struck” her comes near the end of the book. when a wise machine tells May: “You know the world is damaged. but you don’t know what that means for the lives of your children. You want to prepare them for the future, but you’re scared to picture the future.”.

May lives inside that contradiction. She wants to prepare her children, but the future she’s being forced to imagine feels unlivable. Phillips has said that moment was inspired by an article by Elizabeth Kolbert. “A Vast Experiment: The climate crisis from A to Z”. which appeared in The New Yorker on 28 November. 2022.

Phillips also pointed to how she researched and stitched together the world of Hum while wrestling with those same anxieties. The book includes 12 pages of end notes. which she says came from turning to “a lot of writers and thinkers who are researching the future and trying to conjure the future in non-fiction”.

Consumption, she adds, is woven through the plot like a second system of control. One line she highlights is: “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic”. In her end notes, she says the line comes from an interview she had with a professor of urban sustainability. She identifies that professor as Ken Gould at Brooklyn College [New York], who studies sociology and climate change. Phillips says Gould gave her “generous and enthusiastic blessing” to put the words in the mouth of the hum. and that the line is one of her favourites—because it gives readers a “searing articulation” of consumption and how it’s tied to environmental degradation.

For Phillips, Hum doesn’t work like a calendar prediction. She didn’t want it pinned to a single year. She says the adults in the book are old enough to remember a time when much of the tech used by the hums didn’t exist in their lives. The children, by contrast, experience technology in a dramatically different way—one far removed from their grandparents. That’s why she frames the society as a transition moment.

The emotional centre, she says, is May’s search for connection. May wants to connect to her children, to her partner, Jem, to her physical environment, and most importantly, to herself. Throughout the novel, those connections are repeatedly “elusive”. There are things working against her, Phillips explains, and her goal becomes inching toward something better without taking easy paths. She describes the emotional journey as May being thwarted—and then, without spoilers, “inching closer” to connection at the end.

The interview also circles back to what a book can do when the stakes are this personal. Phillips says she would like readers to finish Hum and feel a desire to cherish the nature they still have. to think about how to protect it for the future. and to remember not to take it for granted. She said stories can make a difference. but she doesn’t believe a writer should set out to build a didactic message. Instead. she describes the novel as a question more than an answer—something that gets people thinking by putting a family in motion through a world shaped by climate change. technology. and the logistics of survival.

She places hope in something straightforward: connection. “The first step of any of this is that we are connected to one another. ” she says. adding that people need to perceive each other’s humanity and want to join together in caring for the world. For her, the first step is connecting with other humans and having “a sense of shared value”.

Climate Fiction prize Hum Helen Phillips Climate Spring climate change surveillance artificial intelligence robots hums privilege near-future metropolis Jul May Jem Imperial College London Friederike Otto Jessie Greengrass