A Conversation with Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel.
What is your new novel, The Dream Hotel, about?
The Dream Hotel is set in Los Angeles in the near future. Sara leads what is by all appearances an ordinary life; she works at a local museum, has a husband and twin toddlers, and spends her free time hiking or backpacking. But one day, on her return home from a conference in London, agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside.
Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that Sara is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents quickly transfer Sara to a “retention center,” where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the petty rules of the facility, their stay is extended.
How would you describe the Risk Assessment Administration you imagined in this novel?
The RAA was founded after a particularly awful mass shooting, with a goal of stopping crime before it happens. And the way it does this is by collecting all kinds of data (legal, financial, residential, reputational, etc.) and using algorithms to assign every American a crime-risk score. So, a score above 500 means you’re at an elevated risk of breaking the law.
One source of inspiration for my novel is our current financial credit score system (FICO) which did not come into wide use until the 1980s, but is now woven into every part of our lives, determining whether and where we can rent or buy, which in turn affects the services we receive. Basically, the RAA in my novel computes FICO scores, but for crime.
Why has the RAA set its sights on Sara?
That’s the question driving the narrative! Sara’s score ticked up because of troublesome dreams, but of course, dreams are beyond her control or deliberation, so that places her in a bind: she has to prove that she is innocent, but she has no way of stopping her subconscious from incriminating her further.
I really loved getting into Sara’s head. She’s someone who likes to give an appearance of calmness and detachment, but beneath the surface she’s full of rage that can spill out in unexpected moments. As the story progresses, we see a few moments of that, complicating the perception we have of her. The book also includes official documents from her legal file, which at times confirm and at others contradict her story.
Did anything in particular inspire you to write this novel?
Yes, one morning in 2013, I picked up my phone to check the time and noticed a Google notification that said, “If you leave right now, you will make it to YogaWorks at 7.28.” I had never told Google what day of the week, what time of day, or even that I went to yoga, but the company had tracked my movements and in time its algorithms had learned my schedule and habits.
Not long after, Slate reported that Facebook keeps track of everything its users do on the app, including their keystrokes. I realized that if Facebook has a record of unposted comments, in effect it has access to our unvoiced opinions, which is to say our thoughts. I remember I turned to my husband and said, “Pretty soon the only privacy we will have will be in our dreams.” And then I thought, wait. What if someday even dreams are monitored?
That’s terrifying! But it’s true that surveillance has become more insidious.
The amount of data that the Big Five (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) collect has become more expansive and more granular, threatening our freedoms, our mental health, and even our free will. It’s really not an exaggeration to say that we live in a surveillance society.
Dreams are really our last islands of freedom. I’m a chronic insomniac, so I imagined a sleep-aid device that allows people to get the benefit of a full night’s rest on just four hours of downtime. I started thinking: what might the company that created such a device do with the data it collects? Enter pre-crime.
Why did you place Sara in what you call a “retention center”?
People are presumed innocent until they’re proven guilty. But a future of pre-crime essentially implies that the people whom the RAA stops are somewhere in between: they haven’t committed a crime yet, so they are not sent to prison, but to an in-between space. That’s the retention center, which is a place where they are supposed to be held and observed until such time as they can be cleared or sent for further prosecution. Sara is sent to a retention center outside Los Angeles, where she has to be under observation for 21 days.
The world of your novel seems imminent. Is the future pretty much here?
When I tell people that I wrote a novel in which algorithmic prediction of crimes plays a central part, they immediately respond, oh, so you’re writing a dystopia. But pre-crime isn’t fictional, and it’s not even in our future, but part of our present and our past. We just don’t think of it because it’s called something else.
So, for instance, under Mayor Bloomberg, the NYPD instituted its infamous policy of Stop-and-Frisk, which allowed the police to search individuals who have committed no crime, but whom officers suspected might possibly be involved in one. The No-Fly list is another form of pre-crime, because individuals lose their constitutionally protected right to travel based on suspicion by government officials and through an opaque process that leaves them little room for appeal. There are also examples from the not-so-distant past, like the 1920s Wayward Minors Act, which criminalized young women for nothing more than “intemperate use of liquor” or “disobeying parents” and then sent them to live in correctional institutions.
My intention with The Dream Hotel was to write a futuristic novel that still felt tethered to a recognizable present. I created a future that doesn’t have flying spaceships or little green aliens, but it does have a cure to Alzheimer’s, a vaccine for lung cancer, and a solution to crime: prevent it from happening in the first place.
Should we be afraid of the future you’ve imagined in this novel?
Novels aren’t prophecies, but they are simulations. They’re a way to ask, what if this happened? What would we do, then? By pushing technological surveillance to its extreme limit–that is, by expanding it to dreams–I wanted to explore its power to control and its threat to our freedoms.But paradoxically, writing The Dream Hotel has helped me to shed some of my fears about technology. I started to see more clearly the connections between current forms of surveillance and historical ones, and the continued failure of these systems to dim our need for creation and liberation.
