Before AI takes over the world and puts an end to human creativity, get ready for a shedload of books themed around that subject. Like Helen Phillips’ Hum, a strikingly realistic tale of a world overrun by robots whose main purpose isn’t to kill off humans à la Terminator, but rather to sell them stuff. Sound familiar?

Caught up in this soulless world of mass consumption and ever-increasing debt is May, a mother so desperate to provide for her family that she agrees to let the robots alter her face to train their omnipresent CCTV. Using the payment she receives to take her children to the Botanical Gardens – the last remaining wilderness in a city devastated by climate change – she discovers there’s an ugly truth lurking in the heart of paradise.

Just like Eve before her, May is punished for her knowledge, banished from Eden and universally condemned. Now fighting to keep her family together, she teams up with an unlikely ally: the robot who betrayed her. Invigoratingly original and frighteningly prescient, Hum is a dystopian tale with a heart-warmingly utopian ending. Unless AI can learn to write with this much humanity, there’s hope for us yet.