Get the latest gossip
The Minority Report Gets a Trump-Era Update
Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is an alarming dystopian approximation of what we might be headed toward.
The plot, you may notice, owes debts to Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report, in which three prophetic human “precogs” are hooked up to complicated machinery that reads their minds; they’re also yoked to a brutally efficient police apparatus that makes arrests based on their predictions. Seeing a tablet with lists of detainees, work assignments, and “performance metrics,” Sara is “reminded of colonial censuses, the piles of ledgers maintained by small clerks across the empire, and that made the extraction of labor more efficient.” A mural in the detention facility — a converted elementary school, underscoring the impoverishment of the public sphere in this brave new world — is by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian American painter and Communist Party member questioned in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her finest book, The Moor’s Account(2014), was a resplendent retelling of a disastrous 16th-century expedition to the New World from the perspective of an enslaved person on the journey — whose appearance in the actual historical record is limited to a brief mention in the journals of the explorer Cabeza de Vaca.
Or read this on VULTURE