Big Time

JORDON PROSSER

In the not-too-distant future, Australia’s eastern states have become the world’s newest autocracy – a place where pop music is propaganda, science is the enemy and moral indecency is punished with indefinite detention.

Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, returns to Melbourne after a year overseas and reconnects with his bandmates as they prepare to record their hotly anticipated second album. On a whirlwind tour of the east coast, he gets hooked on a new designer drug, F, a powerful synthetic hallucinogen that gives users a glimpse of their own future. Rumour says, the more you take, the further you see … maybe even to the end of time.

Meanwhile, the outside world is gripped by an escalating pandemic of “extreme coincidences” and temporal anomalies: identical football matches played sixty years apart, cancer patients reporting visions of the afterlife, and other world-altering events that all point back to the Acceptables’ mysterious second – and final – album.

Big Time is an addictive debut about different forms of time travel: the people in our lives, the art we make together, the moments and movements that will live on long after we’re gone. It’s a psychedelic road trip across a dystopian Australia, through a world on the brink of temporal collapse, and out to the furthest reaches of time and space.

Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, and his short films and screenplays have won multiple international accolades. His short story Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022 and was published in Meanjin. Big Time is his debut novel.