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
