Past and Present Visions of the Future:
Hum (2024), The Dream Hotel (2025)

The thing about contemporary sci-fi and speculative fiction is that it’s hard to instill that stirring, dreading awe at the concept of a dystopian future when that future is now. Works in these genres are most successful when they immerse the reader in worlds that don’t just feel real because they’re detailed and lived in and complex, but because they also reflect our current world in ways that make you think. Even if the setting is a little too fantastical to be a plausible future, we can still see the warning in how those worlds came to be.

These days, though, it’s hard to find that kind of dystopian story. Scifi and speculative fiction of the past had at least a decade or two before their predictions came true. Technological advancement, political turmoil, and climate change move so fast now that even perfect clairvoyance in the form of fiction just isn’t that impressive. These works don't feel prescient; they just feel depressing.

Hum

On a prose level, Hum by Helen Phillips is breezy and engaging. It’s more cerebral than epic, inhabiting the head of its protagonist May Webb, recently laid-off mother of two, as she becomes increasingly unstable following a paid experimental procedure that makes her face undetectable to the world’s ubiquitous surveillance system. Made unstable by a hyper-capitalist, tech-dependant society serviced by androids called hums, May immediately begins to spend the money from the surgery on frivolous things—food subscriptions and piles of same-day deliveries, four new pairs of hiking boots, and a three-day stay in the Botanical Garden, a nature preserve at the center of the city which reminds her the forest she grew up with. 

Before they leave for the Garden, May confiscates her children's phones, called Bunnies, and demands that she and her husband not bring their phones either. It’s an impractical choice, making it much more difficult to travel and keep the kids quiet, and sets the stage for a disastrous climax that involves losing her children in the garden and being publicly shamed for it and all her preceding choices by video from the android and other hidden cameras being leaked to the internet. But you can understand why she did it. May is disillusioned with this world, and scrambling for any way she can to disconnect herself from it.

Phillips probably thought we had more time before her world became reality. 2024 was a comparatively hopeful year. In 2026, Hum just reads as a mildly hyperbolic account of the current state of our world, with a bit of an I, Robot flourish. We have Amazon, we have overwhelming surveillance, we have the crushing knowledge that your data is not just you, your face, your name, your address; it's the you-shaped hole that is left in the web even after you remove yourself.

The Dream Hotel

The Dream Hotel is a 2025 dystopian fiction novel about surveillance, censorship, conformity and criminal justice reform. The crux of the story is a Minority Report-like pre-crime risk assessment, based partly on harvested dreams, that the protagonist Sara Hussein, museum archivist and also a mother, has fallen victim to through a case built on spurious evidence. 

Sara was not forced directly by the government to give up the privacy of her dreams—she was forced by the hand of the market, and its lack of support for mothers.The dream watchers are a private company that provide a neural chip sleep aid in exchange for access to your dreams. The government then pays for the data they collect and makes criminal justice decisions based off of that.

The ending is what I found underwhelming: she returns home after causing too much trouble in the prison for the guards to want to keep a hold of her. She was successfully organizing her fellow inmates against the tyranny and neglect of their jailers. It makes sense that she would accept the chance to escape her confinement—she can do more for her comrades from the outside than behind bars. But there is no longer an immediate need for her to do so. It feels like a betrayal, that she took her freedom, giving herself the opportunity to return to a level of relative ignorance. 

This is the kind of ethical compromise that activists, and minorities forced in activism, have to make everyday. Have been making throughout the history of resistance, but are now becoming increasingly visible in our current age of media. It is incredibly real, and that’s sort of the problem. No one is toppling regimes or beating the system or escaping the matrix in these stories. Putting down one of these recent novels does not feel like stepping away. It feels like pulling your hand back from the fire only to realize you’re still in the pot.

Shifts in the Landscape

Despite my nostalgia-born gripes, I understand the trend. I understand the desire to look at the edge of the cliff that we are speeding towards and scream about it in the form of prose. Does no one else see how steep the drop is? How easy it would be to hit the brakes, if the driver would only listen? Hum and The Dream Hotel, and others in the cli-fi, near future dystopian wave are cries for help in the face of many concurrent, rapidly encroaching global crises. 

The fading-out of far-future or post-apocalyptic epics like Ender’s Game or The Stand, or even the YA dystopian rebellions like Hunger Games or Divergent is just the other side of the coin: it's hard to look to the future when the present is so dire.