This feels like a time for near-future dystopias, and two of the most remarkable recent ones have been The Dream Hotel (2025), by the Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami, and Rakesfall (2024), by the Sri Lankan writer-to-watch Vajra Chandrasekera. (Rakesfall, incidentally, won this year’s Ursula K Le Guin Prize.)
In the former, a final barrier has been breached. Apps are now accessing our dreams. From here, the nightmare spins out: preventive policing programmes are now using the data to detain people who have not (“yet”) committed a crime, in a growing number of retention centres, that are run for profit.
The masterful novel echoes dystopian classics from Philip K Dick’s Minority Report and Franz Kafka’s The Trial to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
It ends, mercifully, on a note of hope. Because “we are not cogs in a machine. We are human beings,” as Lalami put it, in an interview with HT Wknd. “We have within us both the capacity to create these terrible dystopian systems, and the capacity to build an alternative future together.”
Now to Rakesfall. What can one say about a novel that begins with a slightly manic TV show in which the audience is also being watched by the “actors”… and then sweeps… across eras, dimensions, realms of the living and the dead? Rakesfall takes our idea of reality and twists it out of shape, and in doing so offers breathtaking moments of clarity on how twisted-out-of-shape it already is.
{{/usCountry}}Now to Rakesfall. What can one say about a novel that begins with a slightly manic TV show in which the audience is also being watched by the “actors”… and then sweeps… across eras, dimensions, realms of the living and the dead? Rakesfall takes our idea of reality and twists it out of shape, and in doing so offers breathtaking moments of clarity on how twisted-out-of-shape it already is.
{{/usCountry}}Our techno-dreams, our hubris, our unwillingness to admit how far we have fallen (and are falling)… With this read, prepare for a ride that will whirl every which way, and then turn inward, to take residence in your mind.
Finally, on a rather different note, BR Ambedkar’s searing Annihilation of Caste (1936) turns 90 next year. This is a good time to revisit the version available in e-reader editions for under ₹100 — not just for the arguments themselves, which, of course, shouldn’t have to be made, but for the true delight: The segments that contain Mahatma Gandhi’s response to the book, and Ambedkar’s response to Gandhi. Oh, the snark, the wit, the sheer masterful audacity. You won’t ever see either man in the same light again.