Lalia Lalami
Bloomsbury Circus
Otago Daily Times, May 10th 2025
Laila Lalami’s previous work, which draws on her own experiences as a Moroccan American, has explored the differential application of rights and freedoms to people of different social, racial or natal backgrounds. Her latest novel, which carries echoes of Minority Report and School for Bad Mothers, extrapolates these themes into a disturbingly plausible future.
As a child, Sara Hussein and her family would invariably stopped and searched by airport security. Since the advent of algorithmic risk assessment, however, she has travelled without difficulty. Until, that is, the system at LAX flags her as at ‘imminent risk’ of committing a criminal offence. Of particular concern are her dreams, recorded by a sleep-enhancing neuroprosthetic implant, which indicate she poses a serious threat to her husband’s safety. And rather than join her family for a ‘welcome home’ luch, Sara is transported to Madison retention centre for forensic assessment.
Technically she is still ‘free’ – after all she has not actually committed an crime – merely unable to leave until the standard 21-day observation is complete. But Madison is a prison in all but name, and the extra-judicial nature of ‘retention’ means Safe-X, the private contractor running the facility, can issue extensions to the holding period without the need for external approval. Which is very convenient, since their business model relies on retainee labour both to maintain the facilities and deliver on the external contracts which provide the company’s lucrative secondary income stream. Little surprise then that everything, from the smallest infraction of Madison’s numerous arbitrary rules to the fact she associates with suspected criminals – her fellow retainees – increases Sara’s risk score. And as weeks slip into months with no prospect of release, she starts to wonder whether the algorithm knows her better than knows herself.
As a reader, I shared Sara’s feelings of frustration, powelessness, and anger at the injustices meted out by an untouchable and unaccountable system. Even harder to bear is knowing that her18-month old twins are growing up without her. But these difficult emotions are balanced by Sara’s determination to fight back, and the novel’s ending leaves room for seeds of hope without tipping too far towards an unrealistically happy-ever-after
China Miéville recently observed that science fiction reflects the ‘now’ of its writing, and Lamia’s vision is dangerously close to being overrun by events (witness the UK ‘s development of a ‘murder prediction’ tool). And while our thoughts and dreams are, mercifully, still private, companies already scour the vast amounts of cloud-stored personal data ways to profit from us. Law enforcement is presumably not far behind. What such algorithms are shaped by those who design them, and what they will find depends on what they is tasked with: “[How] hard do you think it is to make someone look guilty?…We’re already under suspicion. Once the algorithm has a case to make, it picks the evidence it needs from the data it can access…[it] is bound to miss exculpatory evidence because it’s not looking for it in the first place.”