The Dream Hotel

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if a crime could be prevented before it is actually committed! _The Dream Hotel_ depicts a society in the near future where people’s risk scores are calculated on the basis of a number of factors. If their score is too high, they are sent to a retention centre – “Mind you”, the authorities claim, “it’s definitely not a prison, it’s more like a summer camp” – where they can work on reducing their score. Sara Hussein, who has been in the California-based facility Madison for 291?days, knows by now that this is a lie. Confronted with capricious guards, desperately missing her husband and young twins and trying to keep her sanity, she does her utmost to fight the system. But the choices she has to make are hard. While reading, you can’t help being completely drawn into the story as you realise that several elements in this future society are already being used in the present. It is just a matter of fine-tuning and we could actually find ourselves living a life where only data are important, and not the truth.