Great America in Dead World, David Agranoff (Quoir Publishing, July 2025)
Who suspected that Philip K. Dick had an organized point-by-point novel writing formula up his sleeve? I’ve heard a lot of suppositions about Dick’s writing process, and while these often suggested something about speed, and well, “speed”, the suggestions were diverse:: He was a genius. He was a mad genius. He wrote quickly–he typed 120 words per minute–because he was paid by the word and had a lot of ex-wives. Drugs and more drugs. He expanded novellas into disjointed, broken-backed novels. He’d sell an outline for advance money and not follow it. All of this makes it sound like Dick’s writing process was applied entropy from page one to the final, often ambiguous, twist.
On the other hand, readers of PKD can agree on a handful of repeated elements in Dick’s novels: the kind-of hero who has a job working with his hands, a boss who talks down to the hero while also fighting with his own wife, a dark-haired girl who evokes excitation and disturbance, questions about what is reality and what is genuinely human, and yes, drugs. But despite all of these elemental repetitions, while readers could lay out a character relationship and power structure for many of Dick’s novels–scholars have done so–I doubt anyone ever imagined that Dick had written a step-by-step formula organizing his thinking. As it turns out, Dick wrote exactly that kind of novel writing formula in 1964 in a five-page letter to the at-that-time young writer Ron Goulart, describing “how I write a novel.” Now David Agranoff–novelist, Dickhead Podcast co-host, and Amazing Stories columnist–has combined his study of Dick’s novel formula letter with his own immersion in PKD and performed an experiment in writerly method acting. Agranoff has said that he imagined what PKD would think and write about if he were alive in our era, and from this has come Agranoff’s new novel, his twelfth, Great America in Dead World.
In the novel, Kai Dame works as a support-class “Janie” who performs custodial and maintenance tasks on the zonked-out, long-fingernail-growing naked bodies of citizens wealthy enough to frolic with their friends in the hyper-stimulating simulation of Great America Plus. In the sim, people experience all of the senses of the body while the Janies get to clean up their clients' bodies on the backend. Roger Greenstone, the chief of staff for the eternally pompous President Supreme, hires Kai to convince his Luddite father-in-law to agree to have his brain “boxed” so that he can join the entire family in the highest level sim, Heaven. If Kai can convince the father-in-law, she’ll earn enough money to fulfill her dream of entering the Great America Plus sim herself. Urgency increases as Greenstone learns that climate change is causing severe decline in the production of Foodle, the taro and amaranth based goop that is society’s food source. (Apparently, if you are immersed in a simulated reality that tells you that you’re eating your favorite Chicago-style pizza while your unconscious, intubated body is absorbing its protein from Foodle, this pre-poop is delicious!) The unstoppable crop failure will lead to a massive food shortage, food riots, vigilante violence, cannibalism and for dessert, death for everyone–even those bodiless brains in the Heaven sim will eventually die when the nuclear power runs out.
The near-future world of Great America features extrapolations and dark mirror reflections and metaphors of today’s world that are both narratively engaging and cognitively troubling: mass shootings occur regularly and NRA-supplied mass shooter prognostications are broadcast along with the weather; personalized advertising is airborn and mobile, its pestering interruptions only avoidable by paying a fee; Kai has an A.I.-developed avatar that simulates her online and posts on her social media, and Kai comes to learn that her “Aver” knows her as well as she knows herself, and sometimes sooner.
Agranoff shows us the novel’s world through the eyes of his characters, using multiple character-focused third-person narrators, as was Dick’s frequent approach. This narrative technique supports one of Agranoff’s greatest strengths in this novel: his nuanced and empathetic evocation of the emotional and cognitive experiences of his characters as they interact with their high-tech bodily augments, the simulated worlds, and the extreme sandstorms and heat of climate disaster. For all of its imaginative invention and grim detail, the novel remains close to the human qualities of its characters, even when the characters themselves are immersed in simulations or are themselves A.I.-constructed avatars.
Reading Great America, PKD fans will have extra-credit fun as they recognize numerous homages to characters and plot elements borrowed from a long-shelf of PKDs novels. But Agranoff’s purpose here is more than homage, and his experiment with Dick’s novel formula provides a book-length source for insight and comparison with Dick’s oeuvre as well as helping readers evaluate for themselves the legitimacy of Dick’s own claim about his novel writing formula, that “this is how PKD gets 55,000 words (the adequate mileage) out of his typewriter.”
At the end of this book, Agranoff has included a spoiler-filled essay analyzing Dick’s novel writing formula as described in the letter to Goulart along with explanations about Agranoff’s thinking and process as he approached this novel. Like the story, the story behind the story is worth your attention to see how Dick’s map suggested and guided Agranoff’s writing.
It has been said–thank you, Alfred Korzybski—that the map is not the territory, and certainly in Dick’s novels we sometimes come to realize that the territory isn’t the territory either, at least not in the way we thought. This is true of Great America in Dead World as well, and it is part of what makes this novel a territory worth exploring.
