InThe Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami Writes About the Future to Understand the Present (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Laila Lalami and the cover of ‘The Dream Hotel’.Photo:Beowulf Sheehan; Pantheon Books

Beowulf Sheehan; Pantheon Books

Laila Lalami got the idea for her new novel,The Dream Hotel, from a Google alert.

Pantheon Books

“When I look at AI, I see it as kind of a new version of that same impulse that says, ‘We, the people who invented this technology, have greater rights than everybody else, and we will assert them,’” Lalami says. “The book is speculative, yes — it’s set in the future — but at all times, I was thinking in larger historical terms, putting it in that context and reinforcing that even this moment is going to be one day part of history and is connected to those old historical impulses.”

Laila Lalami.Beowulf Sheehan

Beowulf Sheehan

“It’s not that AI is good or bad; it’s a tool,” Lalami says. “The problem is that, as a tool, it is really in its earliest stages and its error rate is still very high … The performance doesn’t seem to justify the enormous amount of resources that it’s consuming.”For her protagonist, Sara, the child of Moroccan immigrants, the act of surveillance and its potential for error is even more heightened. Lalami, who was raised in Morocco before moving to California for graduate school in 1992, has previously explored what it means to be a citizen in both her fiction and nonfiction, especially her 2020 nonfiction bookConditional Citizens.She saysThe Dream Hotelcould be interpreted as a metaphor for the U.S. immigration detention system.

“People who are in that retention center are people who are there because of their dreams,” she says. “Surveillance is not neutral. Children are surveilled more than adults. LGBTQ+ people are surveilled more than straight people. Women are surveilled more than men.”“By creating this retention center, and focusing on a woman character, my hope was to broaden how we think about surveillance beyond the technological aspect of it,” she says.And while Lalami is entering into a new genre withThe Dream Hotel, it’s all part of her process. The author tries “to do something different” with every novel to “get better at my craft” and has noticed an uptick of interest in dystopian novels, like George Orwell’s1984andMargaret Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale.

“People are really hungry for imaginative explorations of this particular moment in our history, and not just for having it reflected to them, but also seeing how characters are finding their way out of that,” she says.But writing a speculative novel, Lalami notes, is not just about making predictions about the future: It’s also about looking critically at our current moment.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!“By writing [about] the future, I was really exploring the present,” she says. “I was really simulating one possible scenario for the future, and going through that thought experiment and taking it to its logical conclusion. So if we continue on this path of data collection unchecked, this might be one thing that we’re risking.”“I didn’t expect when I started working on a novel set in the future that I was actually working through my own anxieties about the present,” the author adds. “And that was a very nice surprise.”The Dream Hotelis now available, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com