Five books that offer a disquieting window into our possible futures
Contemporary fiction chronicles the things around us. Science fiction imagines a futuristic world. But speculative fiction sits in between – envisaging a world that is not ours, but is nonetheless close enough to touch. Like the Netflix series Black Mirror, speculative fiction offers a disquieting window into our possible futures.
The Dream Hotel
Laila Lalami
Bloomsbury, $29.00
Hoping to improve her sleep, Sara Hussein installs an innovative prosthetic device in her brain. Unfortunately, Sara doesn’t read the fine print – who does? – and she fails to realise that the company is also sharing her dreams with the authorities. One night, Sara dreams of killing her husband. A few days later, landing at Los Angeles International Airport, she is detained by officials who inform her that her risk score has gone beyond the acceptable level. For the safety of her husband and the community, Sara must be detained in a retention centre for 21 days.
And so the dream becomes a waking nightmare. Echoing the worst patterns of custodial institutions, the retention centre is operated by Safe-X, a commercial firm that profits from keeping costs low and penalising even trivial breaches. Each infraction extends Sara’s stay. Complaints must be made to automated systems, which reply with non sequiturs. Legal help is slow to arrive. Friends desert her, fearful that visiting will lower their own risk scores.
Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial begins: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” A century on, Lalami’s novel updates the story for a technological age, except that this time a corporation is in charge. Sara’s attempt to leave the retention facility to see her husband and two children collide with the company’s goals of squeezing as much profit as possible out of its retainees. She isn’t in a prison, she is told, and she hasn’t been convicted of a crime. But she can’t leave until her risk score makes her safe.
If The Dream Hotel lacks the pace of Minority Report, that’s partly the point. Incarceration shrinks the world of those inside. Sara comes to recognise the smell of her roommate’s skin cream, to loathe the “greyish liquid” ladled onto her plate at mealtimes, and to worry endlessly about what she might have done differently to avoid being incarcerated. In a world where brain-computer interfaces and predictive analytics are rapidly improving, Lalami helps us imagine how we would feel if the machines got it wrong, and she reminds us of the dangers of surveillance capitalism run amok.
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan
Vintage, $29.99
The year is 2119. Sea level rise has broken Britain into islands. Nigeria is a superpower. People eat protein bars, and travel by foot or bicycle. The world hasn’t fallen into fighting; it’s simply slipped backwards a few centuries. The cause, of course, is climate change. Plenty of novelists have woven the issue of climate change into their stories, but most efforts are heavy-handed or clunky.
Characters deliver implausible monologues that sound like they’ve been cribbed from a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest synthesis report. Sometimes, the author’s anger at the state of the world leaves the reader feeling more scolded than moved.
What We Can Know avoids this trap because climate change is the backdrop to a rollicking yarn. Literary historian Thomas Metcalfe – a specialist in the era 1990 to 2030 – is determined to find a lost love poem. McEwan makes the missing poem feel consequential, hinting that its rediscovery would reshape how the future interprets the early21st century. Expeditions, murder, lust and betrayal shape the plot, while the characters crackle with complexity. Like AS Byatt’s Possession, present and past intertwine, casting historians as sleuths.
As Thomas searches for the truth of the past, he has access to every email written a century earlier. In the 22nd century, the physical landscape has been transformed, yet the digital record is perfectly preserved. So can they find one of the world’s most famous poems – orally delivered once, and then inscribed on vellum? At age 77, McEwan’s talent for big themes and bold storytelling is as sure as ever.
Culpability
Bruce Holsinger
Europa Editions, $34.99
A family is travelling down a highway, relying on an autonomous driving system, when their minivan smashes into an oncoming car, killing the occupants. Who was culpable? At the wheel was 17-year-old Charlie, who was supposed to be monitoring the autodrive system. In the front passenger seat was his father, Noah Cassidy, who was supposed to be monitoring Charlie. In the back are their mother, artificial intelligence expert Lorelei Shaw, and two young daughters, Alice and Izzy, who were arguing at the time of the crash.
Attempting to recover after the accident, the Cassidy-Shaw family rent a holiday house on Chesapeake Bay, where they encounter technology billionaire Daniel Monet. Handsome, charming and driven, Daniel is a mix of Jack Dorsey and Reid Hoffman, with a dash of Sam Altman. He also has a beautiful daughter, Eurydice, the same age as Charlie.
Privilege sits at the heart of the story. Noah is jealous of the billionaire next door, with his security detail, private chef and helicopter. But this is a case of someone in the top 1 per cent envying someone in the top 0.01 per cent. When the police come knocking, Noah hires the best lawyer in the state to defend his son. He will pay any price to protect his golden son.
With chatbots, drones and driverless cars, Culpability is a book for the moment, a tale of right and wrong that seems tailor-made for book club reading. Which family member do you blame? Or was it all the fault of the algorithm?
The Island of Last Things
Emma Sloley
Text, $34.99
Camille and Sailor are workers at the last zoo in the world, located on the former prison island of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay. Owned by the billionaire Pinkton family, Alcatraz Zoo struggles to survive in a polluted world. Mould blight and controlled burns have contaminated the air. Jellyfish fill the bay. People use EZ-Breathe inhalers to cope with the pollution. Almost all the available meat is Fake Steak.
Part of the trick of this novel is that Australian author Emma Sloley only hints at how the world has changed. This is a novel about the future, but Sloley never spells out how we got here. Instead, the novel focuses on Alcatraz Island, and the connection between two women who love taking care of animals. Sloley captures the frisson of excitement of a new friendship, in which the rest of the world seems to retreat, and in which breaking the rules can draw two people closer together.
There are plenty of other people in this book, but the best scenes are with the non-human animals. Chimps and capybaras, elephants and eagles, are described with the flair of an author who has spent a lot of time watching, and smelling, zoo animals.
Nostalgia becomes this novel’s emotional engine, reminding readers that even imagined futures carry the ache of lost worlds. As the main character observes ruefully: “My generation, we’re like animals born in captivity: we accept the state of things because it’s pretty much all we’ve ever known. Sailor was old enough to have experienced a better world. And that knowledge was a sadness she could never shake.”
A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar
In Kolkata, India, a family packs up their home and prepares to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Flooding and violence afflict their home city, and the United States has granted them “climate visas″. But a few days before their departure, a crime derails their plans.
A Guardian and a Thief is no simple whodunnit. We quickly learn the identity of the perpetrator, whose offence was part of a cascading sequence of wrongs. In almost every chapter of this slim novel, a crime takes place. In almost every instance, we see the crime from the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim. When people are hungry and homeless, when officials are corrupt or indifferent, the boundaries of morality become more fluid.
The joy of this novel is in the details. The honey collectors who venture deep into the forest to collect wild honey, protecting their face with simple scarves. The 17-year-old girl who chops onions and chilli with a baby bound to her chest. The trash-pickers who work over the garbage of others, celebrating finds that they can eat or sell. The boys playing street chess on an upturned cardboard box.
If there is a moral message in this novel, it is encapsulated in a thought from a ration shop owner: “Aren’t you different before different people? Aren’t you sometimes harsh, and sometimes kind? That is how I am.” As the saying goes, humans are crooked timber. All of us are better than the worst thing we have done. Whatever the future holds, our choices bend with circumstance, yet our capacity for decency endures.
Andrew Leigh is a member of the Australian parliament, and the author of several books, including The Shortest History of Economics.
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