“The people in your life are a form of time travel; knowing them, then losing them, is like pausing the hand on a clock.”

“Is it always such a hopeless vortex of existential dread, political delinquency and poor taste? In a word, yes.”

Jordan Prosser’s debut novel Big Time (2025) is a brilliant, bonkers, and surprisingly moving exploration of time and memory while living in dystopia, told through the story of a band breaking up while it records its ambitious but troubled second album. It’s sort of like Nineteen Eighty Four via Spinal Tap. That might convey some of how amusing Prosser’s novel is, but what might surprise the reader is how moving and profound Big Time is. It’s a novel about ageing and loss, about the dreams and innocence of youth crushed by authoritarianism and circumstance, about the million ways in which living under a repressive regime eats away at your soul. But it’s also the story of FREA indie-rock stars the Acceptables, their ill-fated attempt to embrace politics on their second and final album, an epidemic of coincidences, and a drug that allows the user to see through time. In the hands of a lesser author, the combination of all these bizarre ideas, gonzo humour and serious intent could result in a complete mess. Prosser manages to tie it all together brilliantly, creating a funny, exciting, and thought-provoking read that really ought to be a shoe-in for the Philip K. Dick Award next year.

Julian Ferryman is bass player for the Acceptables, a fairly anodyne indie-rock band from the Federal Republic of East Australia, whose debut album Artificial Beaches on Every Mountain / Artificial Mountains on Every Beach is bland and uncontroversial enough to be a big hit under the country’s repressive Central Government. Julian has just returned to Melbourne after a year in Colombia, and finds that the band have changed direction in his absence. Lead singer and songwriter Ash Huang has started taking F, a powerful hallucinogen that lets the user see into the future, and under the influence of girlfriend Oriana Devereaux is taking their music in a radical, new and politically-inspired direction. Guitarist Xander Plutos and drummer Tedeski are swept up by Ash’s ambitious new music for In the End It’s All Okay, and If It Ain’t Okay, It Ain’t the End, but Julian just wants to play the hits and enjoy the Acceptables’ success without causing controversy given FREA’s notoriously harsh treatment of political prisoners. When the band finish recording their album, the Acceptables go on a drug-fuelled apocalyptic road trip across dystopian Australia. As the government’s secret police start closing in, Julian becomes hooked on F and finds he has a startling gift for seeing ever further into the future. As time unravels and coincidences abound, the clock is winding down on the Acceptables. Despite their ability to see into the future, they just don’t know it yet.

Big Time is told in a breathless gonzo style that is both compelling and amusing. Our narrator is Wesley, a journalist who is one of the group of friends, artists and hangers-on who are caught up in the Acceptables’ slipstream. He is friends with the band and their entourage, but maintains a wry humour about it all and is levelheaded enough not to believe the hype he generates for the Acceptables, making him an entertainingly droll narrator. He describes the Acceptables’ petty in-fighting, and their ambitious attempts to make music that actually means something despite this remaining just outside their grasp. But he also has a wry sense that none of this is really as important as it feels to Ash, Julian, Xander and Tammy. The stories of the band’s excesses are interspersed with chapters about the mechanisms of the future police state, Oriana’s group of rebels trying to subvert it through any means necessary, including pop music, and the lives of the people outside of FREA who are caught up in the emergence of F and the resulting destabilization of time. The Acceptables, at the end of the day, are just a bunch of feckless young people trying to live out their youths in a restrictive society, blithely unaware of the toll that the reality around them is taking on everyone else until it hits them personally. This is where a lot of the novel’s pathos and sad humour comes from.

Big Time does an admirable job of focusing on the lives of a handful of people but also exploring how the destabilization of time would warp and reshape society. The ability to see the future brings with it all sorts of knotty questions about causality, predestination and free will. In the West Republic of Australia, outside of the totalitarian FREA, we get to see a society where people have thrown out old calendar systems as obsolete, but predictably are having trouble agreeing on a workable replacement, leading to utter chaos. A dying cancer patient sees beyond her own death into the afterlife, which for her is a vision of a supermarket, posing all sorts of theological challenges to society at large. An old man from Brazil lives long enough to see a football match from his youth in Buenos Aires re-enacted move for move between two Scottish football teams, prompting the development of the study of coincidences as a serious science and utterly disrupting professional football. In this way, Big Time humourously looks at the ways both big and small disruptions to time would cause trouble for individuals and society. 

But at its heart, this is a book about memory, about growing old, about regret. Wesley is reflecting on all of this from some personal distance, as we discover through what happens to him and the other characters as the story progresses. In many ways, the novel is a eulogy to lost youth, to the brightness and arrogance of youth that can never be recaptured, that intensity of feeling that we all feel slipping away as we grow older. Julian is a very self-obsessed character, but then again he never asks to be given the dubious gift of seeing through to the end of time. All of the characters wind up losing a lot to the oppressive government, even those who don’t particularly see themselves as heroic or politically engaged. Their wild-eyed innocence ultimately pays the price for living in a deeply cynical society. 

Big Time manages the rare trick of being incredibly funny and outrageously sad. It’s ridiculously fun to read, and I found myself dreading the ending – partly because I wanted to spend more time with these ridiculous characters, and partly because Prosser makes no bones that this isn’t a book that’s going to end happily for anyone. Big Time is immensely enjoyable, and simultaneously manages to explore a lot of complex ideas – about time, but also about people and living in a fascist state – intelligently and compellingly. Prosser’s unique approach to the speculative has created a delightful masterpiece. 

 Big Time is available now from Dead Ink Books –  you can order your copy on Bookshop.org