If you spend any time on social media, you’re likely to have noticed a nearly palpable fear of the future. “What stage of dystopia is this?” people will ask, usually in response to a news item about technological surveillance, or AI-guided airstrikes, or mass deportations, or climate disasters. Sometimes, the feeling is phrased as a complaint about the current administration (“We live in the dumbest dystopia”), but other times it’s stated in terms that apply to our entire system of governance ( “America is a dystopia.”)
Yet for all the panic being expressed right now, the future is yet to be determined. Twenty-five years ago, a not insubstantial number of Americans built bunkers and stockpiled canned food because they were convinced that the Y2K computer bug would cause widespread disruption and civil unrest. And just five years ago, hundreds of millions of people around the world went home, thinking that the quarantine that a previously unknown virus made necessary would be over in a few weeks. No one knows what will happen next.
Of course, given enough context and expert knowledge about a specific event, we can make educated guesses about its consequences. But to make a prediction about the future is to make one choice, which doesn’t account for the choices that other people are making simultaneously. There are trillions of possible futures, each the result of decisions all of us are making right now.
Still, imagining the worst of all possible worlds never loses its appeal. When I was in middle school, one of my cousins pressed into my hands a paperback copy of Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des Singes, its pages worn from use. I read it in one sitting, at once fascinated and horrified by the world it conjured, which in the end seemed not that different from our own. I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but exploring the future offered a fresh way to think about the present.
That became clearer to me when, years later, I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time. Here was a story that drew connections between religious fundamentalism, the subjugation of women, and the subversive power of storytelling. Though the book gave me a mix of terror and recognition, it also elicited a strange, lasting pleasure—allowing me to work through my current anxieties, explore ethical questions I might face, and simulate different scenarios and outcomes.
There are trillions of possible futures, each the result of decisions all of us are making right now.
Perhaps that is why literary explorations of bleak futures continue to endure, even in highly troubled times. When George Orwell described doublethink as the ability “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,” he was giving language to a behavior that has gained noticeable ground in recent years. The President has uttered so many exaggerations, contradictions, and outright lies that fact-checkers cannot keep up, yet a majority of his supporters have adjusted to this, choosing to know and not to know.
I’ve spent the last few years working on a speculative novel that some early readers have called a dystopia. The Dream Hotel imagines a future in which Big Tech surveillance penetrates every facet of our lives, including our dreams. “It’s terrifying,” a friend told me after she stayed up late, reading an early copy. But despite spending years imagining all the terrible things that pervasive data collection might do to our individual freedoms and our increasingly fragile societies, I felt a surge of hope when I was finished. Imagining the worst somehow helped me to exorcise it.
I suspect that is because, while writing about the future, I was also reading about the past. History is a collection of futures that did happen, so it was a good indicator of how ordinary people, like the characters in my novel, might react in the face of terrible predations. Life in the 1960s, the 1940s, or the 1860s presented threats no less urgent than those of today. College students occupied buildings, disrupted traffic, and faced armed agents in protest of the war in Vietnam; Jewish resistance fighters organized a revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto; and abolitionists organized to spirit away enslaved people along the underground railroad. I myself come from a country that was under French colonial rule for half a century, and I am alive only because the people who came before me chose to fight predation, rather than give in to it.
The despair I sometimes see online, and which social media magnifies and propagates, rests on the assumption that, like readers, we are passive witnesses to the events around us and that we have no power to change them. This is not true. Power isn’t contained in one person, and it doesn’t flow exclusively in one direction. We each have power, and we can choose to use it alone or in conjunction with others. Our world is not a dystopia. It may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the one we have—and the one we make.
__________________________________
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
