Carolina Miranda
Appearances
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Sarah Hussain hasn't committed a crime. But perhaps she was flagged because she dreamt about it. Or because of the heated argument she'd had with a crackpot on social media. Or maybe it was the images of early 20th century Moroccan rebel fighters she'd been posting to the Internet.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Whatever the cause, Sarah now finds herself incarcerated in the California desert because an algorithm has determined she's an imminent risk. What exactly that risk may be and when and under what conditions she might be released is anybody's guess. This is the dystopian premise of Leila Lalami's gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
In this unsettling vision of the future, a company called DreamCloud makes brain implants that give insomniacs like Sarah a better night's rest while also harvesting valuable data from their dreams. The blandly titled Risk Assessment Administration assigns individuals a score that determines how likely a person might be to commit a violent crime, but how that score is calculated is confidential.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
And the places where high-risk individuals are held for observation, called retention centers, are run by a private company called Safex that contracts out detainees as cheap labor to corporations. Into the crosshairs of these overlapping systems steps Sarah, a busy 30-something mother of twins who works as a museum archivist in Los Angeles.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
She's in the process of returning from a conference in London when an elevated risk score, based partly on data taken from her dreams, gets her dinged for retention at LAX. The Dream Hotel has been compared to Philip K. Dick's 1956 science fiction novella, The Minority Report.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
That story imagined a society in which police arrest people for the crimes they have not yet committed based on data produced by a trio of humans with predictive powers. But the minority report, with its snappy gumshoe dialogue, is told from the perspective of the police.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Lalami instead sends us down the psychological rabbit hole of what it means to be incarcerated without due process in a world where your fate is decided by algorithms. The narrative is propulsive, but what makes the novel so absorbing are the ways the author makes this near-future world come to life.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Much of the story is presented as an omniscient third-person narrative, but in between, Lalamie inserts fragments of emails, corporate reports, and bits of a procedural manual, all of which give insight into the systems that keep people like Sarah indefinitely detained. Ultimately, it is Sarah who is the beating heart of this remarkable story.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
And Lalamie gives us a character that isn't simply an archetype, but a real human being full of ambition and ambivalence. Sarah is a scholar of post-colonial African history who works at the Getty Museum. She's also a woman who dwells on her insecurities and on petty annoyances like the mundane squabbles she has with her husband. Occasionally, she's betrayed by her own irritability.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
The novel credibly conveys her harrowing sense of disorientation as the wide world she once inhabited is reduced to a cell. Sarah's most relatable trait is the struggle she faces trying to contain the rage that she feels over her situation, rage that, if expressed, will only worsen her circumstances. As the narrator tells us, compliance begins in the body.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference. It's a condition that isn't specific to her incarceration. As a woman of color, Sarah's of Moroccan descent, she's not the kind of person who is generally afforded the benefit of expressing anger.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
To inhabit Sarah's story is to hear the echoes of real people who are held in private immigration detention centers, who have no legal recourse and no timeline for when they might get released. Her book also paints a grim picture about the ways in which our data can betray us.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Lalami was inspired to write the novel after receiving a notification from her smartphone giving her the travel time to a yoga class. But she had never set such a reminder. Her phone was simply keeping track of her personal habits. The Dream Hotel is a suspenseful novel. The book's simmering tension is whether Sarah will be able to find a way out of this trap.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
This ordinary woman who has plotted through life has to figure out how to undermine a system that has overtaken her mind and her body.