My impetus for writing a novel stems in part from my fears. My fears (and perhaps yours?) over the past few years include the ever-increasing impacts of climate change and the ever-increasing advances in technology, particularly in surveillance and artificial intelligence. These worries take on the most concrete form for me as a mother of two children. I’m trying to raise them for the world ahead, but it’s a future I can’t really imagine.

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When I started writing my novel buzzI set myself the challenge of imagining a near future. A world that is even more disrupted by climate change. A world in which corporations completely slam the brakes on their consumers. A world inhabited by super-intelligent robots (the “buzz” in the title).

I also challenged myself to imagine how a family finds its way in this context. What does a connection (with oneself, with one’s partner and children, with nature) look like when so many forces seem to conspire against it?

It is becoming easier and easier to write dystopian fiction as our reality tends more and more in that direction. When I set out to buzzI felt obliged not only to evoke the dystopian, but also to look for something different. A possible first step in the opposite direction.

Reading books – both fiction and nonfiction – by authors who attempted to imagine the future proved indispensable to my writing process. These books not only provided me with important factual and psychological information, but also gave me the courage to speculate about the future and imagine how a family might navigate an uncertain world.

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Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Coincidentally, this book begins in 2024. In a future devastated by climate change and societal chaos, a violent attack forces Lauren Olamina (an empath who can sense both the pain and joy of others) to leave the precarious but caring community where her family lived.

On her difficult journey north, she bonds with other travelers and deepens her commitment to the new and far-reaching religion she has created: Earthseed (“God is change”). It’s a pretty hopeless situation, but Lauren Olamina is a figure of hard-earned hope.

Arthur I. Miller, The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity

Miller’s book offers an alternative to the old cliché “robots are going to destroy us all.” In this carefully researched book, Miller explores the positive potential of artistic collaboration between humans and AI.

The artist in the machineand the lecture Miller gave on the subject at Brooklyn College in fall 2019 served as an antidote to my knee-jerk impulse to assume that highly intelligent machines pose a threat to human creativity. Reading Miller’s work and corresponding with him via email helped me to develop the character of the hum in a more nuanced way.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

In this future, wealthy families often purchase AFs (artificial friends) for their children, who live in isolation and are taught via screens. Klara, one such solar-powered android, is purchased as a companion for fourteen-year-old Josie.

I was fascinated by Ishiguro’s portrayal of this embodied robot, embedded in a family and deeply involved in conversations and relationships with humans. Klara’s role in the family takes a dark turn when Josie’s mother begins a disturbing and questionable approach to her daughter’s AF. This book sheds light on the ambiguity of the human-robot bond.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talking in the Digital Age

Turkle’s book helped me think more deeply about the impact of technological development on relationships and family. Turkle challenges the very language we use when we talk about technology. “Cookies,” for example, is a cleverly innocuous term – from childhood onwards, we generally say “yes” when offered a cookie, an instinct that perhaps unconsciously influences us when we are asked to accept cookies on our internet journeys.

When I used the terms “hums,” “bunnies,” and “wooms” in my book, I was thinking about how these terms can influence our impressions of the technologies that surround us.

I also thought about it Regain the conversation in the passage where the humming encourages the two young siblings, Lu and Sy, to look into each other’s eyes; eye contact, as Turkle notes, serves as a precursor to empathy. Resisting the distancing effects of technology can be as simple as ignoring the ringing of your phone in your pocket when someone is talking to you.

Jessamine Chan, The school for good mothers

I read this book after reading a draft of Buzz, and I was intrigued to note the overlap in the two books’ themes: maternal anxiety meets surveillance meets sophisticated robots. In this brilliant debut, a woman deemed unfit to be a mother – due to a single mistake – must fight to prove herself by becoming the mother of a robot child.

Chan portrays Frida’s emotional and legal journey with tender and painful insight.

David Wallace-Wells, The uninhabitable Earth: Life after warming

In this book, Wallace-Wells describes a number of threats that climate change poses to human life and quality of life: “The climate system that made us and everything we know today as human culture and civilization great is now dead like a parent.” These words echoed in my head as I wrote buzz.

In sections with titles like “Heat Death” and “Unbreathable Air,” Wallace-Wells warns grimly about our future and illustrates the danger of pretending everything is normal. Wallace-Wells was himself a new father when he wrote the book, and his message is not all grim:

Climate change poses a grim prospect for the coming decades, but I believe that surrender, not retreat, is the appropriate response to this challenge. I believe we must do everything we can to enable the world to live a dignified and prosperous life, rather than giving up prematurely before the battle is won or lost.

Some animal facts from Wallace-Wells – about the disturbed hibernation patterns of black bears, about plastic in the stomachs of seabird chicks – appear in buzz.

Samanta Schweblin, Small eyes

In Small eyesadorable little mechanical walking pets (“Kentuckis”) are also surveillance devices that reveal their owners’ most private and intimate moments to strangers around the world. The book progresses by moving through a kaleidoscope of different owner-Kentucki constellations, allowing Schweblin to examine in depth the various connections and disconnections enabled by technology.

Franklin Foer, World without spirit: The existential threat posed by Big Tech

Foer discusses how the technologies offered to us by major technology companies affect our relationship to our own thoughts: “Tech companies are destroying something valuable, namely the possibility of contemplation.”

In buzzmy protagonist May struggles to find an inner focus in her advertising-clouded world. In the endnotes to buzzI quote this passage from World without spirit:

“Data” is an anemic word, but what it represents is anything but anemic. It is the record of our actions: what we read, what we watch, where we travel in the course of a day, what we buy, our correspondence, our searches, the thoughts we start typing and then delete… Computer security guru Bruce Schneier has written, “The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time because it does not rely on human memory.” Data means an understanding of users, a portrait of our psyche.

In buzzProblems arise from the invasiveness of the data collected about the family. I can only hope that my book raises the question of what we might do to nurture our relationship with our innermost thoughts.

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buzz by Helen Phillips is available from Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books.