The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami (Pantheon 978-0593317600, $29.00, 336pp, hc) March 2025.

This may sound like an odd question, but are algorithms starting to take over the narrative func­tion that psi powers once served in SF? The idea of preventing crimes by pre-emptively arresting supposed perpetrators has been around at least since Orwell’s notion of ‘‘thoughtcrimes,’’ and in the 1950s this became the province of psioni­cally gifted folks like Alfred Bester’s Espers (in The Demolished Man, which won the first novel Hugo in 1953) or Philip K. Dick’s ‘‘precogs’’ (in 1956’s ‘‘Minority Report’’ and the 2002 Spielberg film). But mind reading hasn’t held up very well as an SF idea, and by 2011 the TV series Person of Interest (for one example) promoted the idea that vast amounts of data-crunching (not to mention surveillance capitalism) could predict terrorist acts, and there was even a fairly obscure 2017 documentary titled Pre-Crime, which made a similar argument in a non-fiction context. Last fall, Charles Baxter’s comic novel Blood Test imagined that a new blood test, after some data-crunching, could predict criminal behavior, and now we have The Dream Hotel from the Moroc­can/American writer Laila Lalami.

Lalami posits an algorithm that can do the same thing partly by analyzing the mountains of personal data already floating around on the web, and partly by adopting a newly developed and wildly invasive technology that makes even dreams available to government bureaucrats. Lalami tells us in a brief note at the end that ‘‘pre-crime’’ is no longer an entirely fictional idea, and her scenario makes a disturbingly credible case for how it might work, given the widespread ero­sion of privacy that we’re already getting way too familiar with. This appears to be the first venture into speculative fiction by Lalami, whose previ­ous novels have earned nominations for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and while its focus may seem a little uneven to me, it’s an undeniably powerful scenario.

Despite the almost cheerful-sounding title, the institution at the center of The Dream Hotel is a grim detention facility – not quite a prison, according to some legalistic parsing of terms – run by a private corporation on behalf of a government agency called the Risk Assess­ment Administration. The RAA is empowered to temporarily detain anyone who, according to various secretive algorithms, is about to commit a crime – even though they may have committed no actual offenses at all. Sara Hussein, an historian employed as an archivist, finds herself abruptly sent there after being detained at LAX while returning from a conference, leaving her puzzled husband (and supposed future victim) waiting at the airport. While Lalami vividly invokes the sense of panic and dread felt by anyone who’s been singled out by customs or airport security, she introduces a new technology that makes the process far more invasive: an implanted device called Dreamsaver, originally designed to treat apnea and other sleep disorders, but which makes the actual content of dreams available to security agencies. As explained to her by the decidedly un­pleasant bureaucrat who detains her, Sara’s dreams are ‘‘among the two hundred data sources used by the crime-prediction algorithm and they’ve raised your risk score above the acceptable threshold.’’ (And we thought credit scores were unnerving.)

While the early chapters of the novel switch between Sara’s fraught experience at the airport and her rocky orientation to the detention facility, a shabby repurposed school in a small California town, the focus soon begins to shift to the facility itself, and to another issue that’s been generat­ing a good deal of controversy lately (as in Cory Doctorow’s recent The Bezzle): the privatization of prisons and similar institutions. Not long after arriving, Sara discovers that many of the inmates have been there for weeks or months beyond their original sentences, and learns that it’s managed by a for-profit corporation called Safe-X, which is paid by the RAA ‘‘to house, feed, clothe, and surveil the people retained for their dreams. Profit flows to this company the other way, too: retainees pay to make calls, receive mail, or get personal sup­plies.’’ Even the lousy food service is provided by a subsidiary of Safe-X, which has all sorts of profit incentives to find reasons for keeping the inmates locked up and minimizing services. For me, Lalami doesn’t entirely escape the inherent problems of all prison novels, such as writing about tedium without sounding tedious, and she resorts to a few familiar character types, such as the sadistic guard (colorfully embodied by a love-to-hate vil­lain named Hinton) or the hardbitten no-nonsense mentor, but she breaks up the narrative by intro­ducing the backstories of several fellow inmates, who are generally well-developed characters, as well as dramatic episodes involving a wildfire threatening the facility and a serious outbreak of norovirus among the inmates. The facility itself is rather low-tech, featuring surveillance cameras not much different from those already in use and handheld staff devices called Tekmerions, which seem to be little more than iPads. But Lalami’s restraint in introducing futuristic technology only adds to the immediacy of her concerns, and the effect is the sort of near-future nightmare that leaves us with the only dystopian question really worth asking: Are we there yet?

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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.

This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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