One author's near future dystopian perspective

Imagine a surveillance state powerful enough to incarcerate people for the wrong dreams.

Excerpt: "It happened to an electrical engineer from New Hampshire, a medical researcher at Harvard University, and an aging auntie from Seattle—all of them permanent residents. They were each returning home to the United States from an ordinary trip abroad when they were pulled aside by immigration agents, subjected to a lengthy interrogation, and then taken into custody and transferred to a detention facility miles away from home.

Now they face an enormous, crushing bureaucracy that uses minor or long-forgotten infractions to keep them under indefinite detention.

This type of encounter is not new, but it is headline news in 2025. It also happens to be how my dystopian novel, The Dream Hotel, opens. Set in a future of total technological surveillance, the book follows an American archivist who is detained at Los Angeles International Airport because an algorithm has used her dreams and behavior to predict that she will commit a crime.

One review called it a “Trump-Era Update” on Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. Another credited its “eerie sense of prescience.”

When I was on tour for the book last month, someone asked if I’d known that the twice-impeached president and convicted felon would return to power."