Lord Running Calm's review of my novel Great America in Dead World

 

 Lord Running Clam is the author of Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion and long time organizer of the Philip K. Dick Festival.

GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD by David Agranoff (QUOIR 2025) – a brief review by LRC

              This novel was controversial before publication because it employs a method of construction based on a letter by Philip K. Dick circa 1964 in which PKD describes how he wrote his own novels at that time. David Agranoff has turned PKD’s dashed-off letter to Ron Goulart into a formula which he has applied to many of Dick’s novels to see if they align roughly with Dick’s words in this letter. He finds they do and with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD he uses the formula (Dick’s letter) to write a novel of his own. A literary experiment, if you will. So, how’d it go?

              Kai Dame, our heroine, spends her days as a ‘Janie’ tending to people, mostly old people, while they rest in their pods at their homes and spend as much of their lives as possible in a massive online world known as Great America where they can be young again. Kai, herself, is always playing a never-ending online game the object of which is to kill lone wolf mass murderers chosen from a large database of real-life events. Success in the game supplies credit towards her goal of affording to pay for the best immersive experience possible: Great World Plus. While doing her daily duties cleaning the waste and supplying Foodle to the oldster’s pods, her online avatar keeps her game and other online activities going. A common practice and nobody knows if they’re communicating with a real person or their online avatar.

              In the real world things are not good despite the affirmations  of President Supreme and his lackeys that America is Great Again. Daily temperatures are over 100 F in Los Angeles and the populace stays cool by aid of built-in tech augments. And, of course, the ecosystem is mostly destroyed and people rely on a product called Foodle to survive. Random mass shootings are commonplace and the people, helpless in the face of worldwide disaster, turn more and more to their online lives. And when President Supreme offers Heaven for the Living – a new totally convincing world simulation, the populace, unsurprisingly enough, goes for it. The only problem is it is very expensive and requires each person to have their brain removed and placed in a Brain Box to be connected to the simulation. Here, by immersion in nutrient fluids the brains live on while the personality is transferred into the sim.

              Kai hooks up with Nick, a rich old man whose family want him to go to Heaven with them. But he’s balking, he lives in the bad air-conditioned real world and is afraid to give it up. It is Kai’s job to persuade him to agree to his family’s wishes.

              Meanwhile, Kai’s avatar – her ‘aver’ – is more and more taking on a life of its own, doing things she may or may not want done.

              She meets Roger Greenstone, a high official in the permanent regime of President Supreme and a member of Nick’s family. Greenstone, a person about as morally void as one might suppose you could find, is tasked by the president to solve the problem of the failing Foodle supply from Canada. But, he, too, is looking forward to life in the new Heaven sim. He’s eager to go because he knows the Foodle supply is failing and who wants to tell President Supreme that?

              As to how it all ends, I recommend reading the book which includes a handy Glossary and Afterword by the author.

              There’s a lot going on here and Agranoff applies PKD’s formula as he sees it to good effect. As he states in his Afterword, he tried to write as if PKD himself lived in our present time of 2025 and looked around at the world as it is now and wrote a science fiction novel.  

              Not an easy task but Agranoff is a confident writer and launches himself on his journey to sort it all out PKD-style. It works! But differently, somehow; Philip K. Dick is all over this novel and it is fun noting all the names and references. Reading through PKD’s 1964 letter to Ron Goulart (unfortunately not included in the book) and comparing with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD you can see how this novel does follow the letter in its own structure. I’ve made no detailed comparison and see Agranoff’s novel as an exciting experiment: a probe into the nature of Philip K. Dick’s style that can only benefit all those who study this great writer. I don’t know if David Agranoff has written or talked about how he handled the multiplicity of problems he faced while writing the book, and this is something he will likely do soon. I look forward to the discussion.

              When I began reading GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD (Ags does have a way with titles!) it reminded me of William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER in that both novels extrapolate from then and now current technologies: circa 1980 and 2025 – but in reverse. GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD reads like a forerunner to NEUROMANCER in that it projects now technology in a way that establishes the nuts and bolts, as it were, of Gibson’s Sprawl. I need to expand on this notion but not here and now.

              Every novel, no matter its structure, is a thing in itself and stands alone. Its excellence lies in the reading experience. Agranoff’s novel is a good read. I read lots of books all at the same time and it is rare that I make it through one without picking up another and reading more there. But, this is a fun straight-ahead story and I rushed through it and, indeed, couldn’t put it down! PKD inspired for sure and a good plot that explores current technological developments in a quasi-PKD way. It also impels a closer look by PKD scholars into how he planned his own novels.

              David Agranoff is to be commended for this experiment.

n  Lord Running Clam, Ward, Colorado July, 2025

Book Review: The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed

 

 

The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed 272 pages, Paperback Published June 3, 2025 by Podium Publishing “Separated by ten thousand years, a team of scientists and their test subject must work together to save the human species―before it’s too late . . .” This one came totally out of the blue to my mailbox. I was offered an arc of this novel at some point, and I remember saying I would check it out. I am currently ass deep in my own novel so by the time I opened the package I forgot what interested me in the first place. Perfect for me as I love reading a novel with zero idea of what it is even about. Back cover descriptions can often lead you to expectations. I really didn’t know a thing. Tim Weed is also not an author whom I don’t know, so I had no reputation to go on either.  I came to this book not expecting much, but I was hopeful.  I have no idea if Tim Weed is a science fiction guy, if this is one of many SF projects, or a one-off environmental novel.I don’t know clearly what the mission statement was, but I got the distinct impression that this novel was not written by someone with a library of SF titles.  Strangely, TAP could be an intense response or a subversion of a sacred sci-fi subgenre, “The Generation Ship novel.”  One of the best Science fiction novels of this century so far was a novel with the same mission. While I think Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson is a better novel expressing the same point, I am not insulting TAP; it is a daring original novel at the same time.  I don’t want to spoil Aurora, so if you have not read it (and you should), then skip ahead.  In that novel, a generation ship goes out from a dying Earth to travel to the nearest star system, and discovers that there is no life available on this other world, so they head back to Earth, hoping that it has regenerated over the decades.  Both novels question the viability of the Generation ship, but in Weed’s story, it never gets off the ground. Despite failing to get off earth, the project retains the name Centuri project, the generation ship is buried underground, and the survivors of humanity (this is not big spoiler) are intended to sleep through a post-human recovery.  The Afterlife Project doesn’t feel like it was written by a Science fiction scenester, but it is a good science fiction novel, it just doesn’t feel like a retread or cookie cutter. It is a good thing.  It is hard to spoil because of the way the narrative shifts from the birth of the Centuri project during the fall of Earth, and eons after the fall, with the results. The back and forth makes for an interesting way to tell this story. We know the end of one of the narratives, but the essence of this novel is the why.   So what makes this story special? First off, the novel comments on all of civilization.  “The simple idea that everything he's ever known could have been so fully erased by the passage of time, computers, smartphones, the Internet. Social media, Hollywood movies, any movies. The Stock Exchange, McDonald's and Starbucks, Coca-Cola, kombucha, NASA, plug-in hybrids, rock'n'roll, jazz. The Roman calendar. Days of the week. Politics. Blueberry scones. Every invention, every creation of the human society he had once known, not to mention his family and friends, and Natalie and the rest of the Centauri team. Everyone he'd ever admired, everyone he had ever scorned, all the human beings he'd ever met, and the multitudes he never did. All of them, banished and expunged. Never to be revisited, except in memory. It was a lot to take in.” It is a lot to take in, and that is one of the things that makes this a thoughtful and enjoyable experience. The above passage shows that the novel carefully considers the weight of what this story represents. It's about the folly of civilization, and one possible way we might survive it. The book is directly speaking to future humans who have a chance to rebuild, but of course, it is directly speaking to us.  “If you are reading this, I hope you have a more generous capacity to forgive your fellow humans than I do and that you will teach your children and grandchildren that there is a better way to live.” One smart thing is that Weed doesn’t assume the beings in possession of this story will read the same language. “If you can't read these words, I presume your attention will be drawn to the graphic representations in the accompanying codex. If you can read these words, then it is my hope you now understand that we have tried our best, and perhaps we're not quite done trying yet. Approximately seven decades before I completed these pages a scientist by the name of James E Lovelock proposed the idea of the last book on earth, a user's guide to living sustainably on this planet after the fall of human civilization. Our version of Doctor Lovelock's idea the codexs that accompanies this one begins with illustrations detailing the factors that led to this fall and continues with some important discoveries made by the species during our first flourishing on this planet. Continuing in graphic form, we include detailed instructions intended to provide a future population you my futuristic friends, whom I address across the gap of however much time may have passed with knowledge that should help you to avoid making the same mistakes we did with humble affection and great hope for our mutual successes…” We don’t get to be these future friends, and the only way to survive is to listen to warnings like these and act. The Afterlife Project is a powerful environmental novel, and first and foremost I felt that way about it. It uses Science Fiction to make a powerful statement about civilization and our desperate need to come to terms with the one and only planet we have.

 

Book Review: Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan

 

Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan

176 pages, Hardcover

Tor, Expected publication September 30, 2025

  “A delirious and gripping story of fatherhood and masculinity, told through the reimagined Greek myth of Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Ariadne, and the Minotaur.”

 Twice in a row, I got arcs for books I didn’t expect to like. I am normally not a fan of fantasy or satire set in mythological worlds, in part because I don’t know their stories. Give me Hindu or Norse mythology, and expect me to get the satire, well, I am generally lost. Sullivan was lucky that a young David read up on Icarus thanks to Iron Maiden.

 This short novel tells the story of Icarus and Daedalus after their famous flight, and it takes place in Tartarus, the Greek vision of hell. In the grand tradition of stories that take place in hell or something like it, my favorite take is from the same publisher as Matheson’s What Dreams May Come.  I think one reason a reader can connect with this story, despite maybe not understanding the mythology involved, is because of the father-son relationship.

Many Fathers throughout history have had to watch as their children metaphorically fly to close to the sun. Daedalus is the ultimate example, and exploring this dynamic with him traveling to Hell to find him makes for both an epic and also relatable journey. Part of the hell is that the labyrinth is impossible to solve. 

“I’m in a yawning cave filled with fiery water and burning white mist. The statue of Minos stands at the cave’s center, upright and whole. The inscription on the base now reads, HE WILL FORGET YOUR FACE.

Icarus. How many times have I done this before?”

Daedalus keeps searching. He can’t make peace with his son, and in a way, that is his hell. This point is made, but it is not heavy-handed.  The descriptions are vivid, but so is the feeling of loss and pain for the man who tells us this story. 

The prose is beautifully written and makes even the most horrible place of all an enjoyable read. There is a chapter called “There is a Path out,” that has two parts I loved

First is a part that presents a melancholia about death that got my attention.  “The best part of being dead is I can always work and never need to sleep. I don’t dread closing my eyes and opening them again inside the labyrinth.”

That said, one of the most powerful elements was the descriptions of this hell.

“A team of dead cartographers and land surveyors is assigned to show me around Hell. They have an unkemptness about them, the distant eyes and delayed responses of men going mad by degrees. This, one of them explains, is because Hell is as big as it needs to be, which renders the performance of their jobs technically impossible.”

There are fewer novels set in hell than you might imagine. Goodreads only lists thirteen. The power of this story can be traced back to the poetic prose as much as the fantastical elements or the vibe of the setting. I was surprised to enjoy this book as much as I did. Daedalus is Dead is a short and powerful dark fantasy, well worth reading.