Phillips, Helen
Entry updated 30 September 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Joined" in The Mississippi Review for Spring 2008. Much of her short fiction, fabulistic and conversant with (though not perhaps deeply penetrating) the toolkit of Fantastika, has been assembled in And Yet They Were Happy (coll 2011) and Some Possible Solutions (coll 2016). Her first novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), a tale mostly set in a manifestly Kafkaesque office/maze, ends in a nightmare of surveillance and Identity seizure. Existentially similar assaults and impostures of Identity irradiate the more domestic motherhood venue concentrated upon in The Need (2019).
Phillips is of more direct sf interest for Hum (2024), where a continuing concern with identity issues and conundrums is placed into a Near Future Dystopian world savagely affected by Climate Change; the protagonist, has had her job replaced by an AI-operated Robot, is paid a large sum of money to have her face cosmetically modified to avoid surveillance, an operation carried out by another robot, one which soothingly emits a physical/spiritual wellness-enhancing hum. But to avoid surveillance in a surveillance world may be to become less than human. The protagonist, who begins to fall through this world along with her children, must find a way to make humanness stick to her. [JC]
Helen Phillips
born Colorado: 1981
works
- The Beautiful Bureaucrat (New York: Henry Holt, 2015) [hb/]
- The Need (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019) [hb/]
- Hum (New York: Saga Press, 2024) [hb/]
collections and stories
- And Yet They Were Happy (Dunkirk, New York: Leapfrog Press, 2011) [coll: pb/Adam Thompson]
- Some Possible Solutions (New York: Henry Holt, 2016) [coll: hb/]
links
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