Futures Not Taken

What sort of a novel is Big Time? It surprises me that science fiction isn’t mentioned in the media release tucked into my review copy of Jordan Prosser’s debut, not even in its list of ‘talking points’. Nevertheless, most reviewers have approached it on the genre’s terms: write-ups in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation, Artshub, Kill Your Darlings, and elsewhere frame the novel as near-future sci-fi, or speculative fiction, a framing further strengthened by its recent shortlisting for an Aurealis award. I know that I’ve been asked to review it on the grounds that anglophone science fiction is my research area, particularly its intersection with psychedelics and counterculture, both of which are slightly more visible in the novel’s log line: ‘Big Time is an anti-fascist ode to the power of pop music, wrapped up in an unforgettable, psychedelic road trip.’ Returning to the media release, Prosser himself frames the novel as ‘a metaphorical lament for the end of your 20s,’ one shaped by an understandable anxiety about the rise of fascism. 

This anxiety is central to the novel’s setting, which depicts an authoritarian Federal Republic of East Australia (FREA), isolated from the west coast and the rest of the world, and enforcing its own brand of censorious nationalist BS. Here we follow Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, a Melbourne band who are about to record their sophomore album. The album’s markedly political content already risks attracting the wrath of the government, but much of its composition has also been inspired by the illegal hallucinogen F – short for ‘Future’. Administered via eye drops, the drug allows its users a glimpse of things to come. 

Already, there’s a lot going on, but it doesn’t stop there: alongside F, there’s an increasing awareness worldwide of Extreme Coincidences. Both begin to change humanity’s relationship to time itself, and, closer to home, trouble the already tense relationships between the band members. Science fiction mingles with political fable – the Acceptables as dissidents – and a political question – are artists actually effective dissidents? All these narrative threads, each contributing new perspectives and images, ensure the novel is an absorbing read. Big Time earns its density, with little feeling superfluous as Prosser traces his characters’ kaleidoscopic trek across the continent. At the same time, there’s a feeling of something missing, which I suggest is also created by the novel’s ambitious scope and sci-fi inflection. 

Before accounting for where this feeling comes from, it’s worth laying out the novel’s strengths. In setting the Acceptables’ touring struggles in a future dystopia that’s also being warped by time-travel drugs, Prosser draws on a long association between science fiction and pop music. It’s most famously embodied by David Bowie, evoked in the black star punctuation of Julian’s eventual solo effort, The Motherf⭑cker Manifesto. But many other artists have taken to the space lanes, from the pioneering space rock of Hawkwind to the retrofuture R&B of Janelle Monáe or the grimy mythopoeias of Australia’s own King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. This relationship goes the other way too, with musicians either performing, writing, or featuring as characters in science fiction. Bowie brought his rockstar credentials to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), based on Walter Tevis’ 1963 novel, and Hawkwind’s association with the British sci-fi scene resulted in a starring role in the novel Time of the Hawklords (1976). Monáe recently collaborated with prominent speculative fiction writers on the collection The Memory Librarian (2022), which elaborates upon the future world portrayed in her music.  

Certainly, next to Hawkwind or Monáe, the Acceptables are pretty ordinary, but they are something original that Prosser brings to this territory: they might be psychedelic seers from the (near) future, but they’re also wonderfully redolent of every Melbourne muso you’ve ever met. Right from the house party that opens the novel, Prosser captures the cadence of the inner-city arts scene: yearning, pontificating, bickering, what’s said (loudly) and unsaid (also loudly). A lot of this is due to Big Time’s ostensible narrator, Wes, who introduces himself as someone ‘speaking pugnaciously about Hollywood’s debt to Jodorowsky to anyone who’ll listen.’ Wes tags along with the Acceptables as a music journalist, his swagger making the near-future setting feel lived in, rather than abstract. Some reviewers seem quite relieved that Wes disappears midway through the novel (although it’s more complicated than that), but I find characters like him to be Prosser’s strength: he has an appealing, if sentimental sense of everyone’s inner universe, something that colours the interludes that open up the novel’s world, as well as Wes’ frequent asides: 

Predictably for a novel like this, other popular yet offbeat writers have been invoked to square Big Time’s eccentricities with the mainstream (Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk, Thomas Pynchon, etc.). However, I think Ash Brom’s comparison of Prosser to Douglas Adams in his Artshub review is the most apt. Adams is eulogised as the man behind the internet age’s nerdiest in-jokes, but his prose is (at its best) beguiling, and the affective scope of his ideas is broader than he’s usually given credit for – he wrote anxiety just as fluently as he wrote comedy. The concept of Extreme Coincidence in Big Time is reminiscent of Adams’ Dirk Gently and his pursuit of the interconnectedness of all things. Like Adams, Prosser draws similar connective threads together to spark moments of wonder.  

The problem with Big Time is that these moments tend to be just that – momentary. When the possibilities of Prosser’s narrative swing into motion, the novel is genuinely gripping, in sequences like the slow burn elucidation of Extreme Coincidences (originally a short story, and home to a very Adamsian gag about probability); in Wes’ maybe-final moments – ‘hot lead searing through my shoulder’; and in a spectacular, heartbreaking F trip right in the thick of things. The electricity of these bigger, weirder set pieces is tangible in Prosser’s depictions of rehearsals, fights, and gigs, like the band’s first show in Adelaide:  

Prosser’s emphasis on the visceral strings the reader along, always on the verge – like Ash’s veins – of bursting into something totally alien. But, typically, the narrative will halt, just like the Adelaide gig, leaving the alien unseen: 

As I’ve already flagged, Big Time is a novel with a lot going on. Too much, other reviewers have argued, but the reverse seems true to me. The novel too often tries to keep its complexity under wraps, where the project might be better served by abandoning itself to ‘hard electricity’ – to realising the lunacy of its premise in full.   

And the novel’s premise is a lunatic one. I expect the alien not only because of how the novel is packaged, with the title spelt out in liquid whorls of colour, but also because the text is plugged into these possibilities. There are the drug trips, of course: the inventory of the band’s illicit stash reads like a nod to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (though without the man-eating reptiles). But more things than these are rendered otherworldly in the novel, including the climate crisis, with skies in Adelaide threatening acid rain and gargantuan ‘sun reflectors’ hovering over Perth. This is coterminous with a crisis in time: the global awareness of Extreme Coincidences triggers riots and deaths, prompted by the sense that ‘time has neither a regular pace, nor a singular direction.’ The mood is apocalyptic, not only in the calamitous but also revelatory sense. It’s the latter that the novel’s protagonists – Julian and the Acceptables and co. – identify with, not just through their music but also their experimentation with F. They’re interested in uncovering the future and what it looks like, even as they ache for a more liberated past. This attitude is exemplified in the character of Oriana. She’s Julian’s ex, though now dating lead singer Ash, but she’s also the band’s supplier of F – and, as it transpires, a prominent insurgent. At one point, Oriana declares, ‘If you want to move forward – really move forward – you have to let go of every single thing behind you. No cherry-picking.’ Yet she stops a page later to put a Phil Collins record on, foreshadowing how much of her political outlook is shaped by her own past, detailed in one of the novel’s many interludes. Oriana and the Acceptables are tuned in to the material conditions of their existence – a fundamental concern of science fiction. It’s no coincidence that early proponents of academic study of the genre were Marxist critics, like Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. Like the Acceptables, who court controversy with songs like ‘Scorched Earth’ and ‘Boot to the Neck’, science fiction writers deploy a near-clinical attentiveness to the weirdness of the present to construct future times and other worlds. The character furthest from this position is Julian himself, whose more conservative outlook makes trouble, both in the novel and out of it. But it’s also Julian that is most science-fictional of all, since he has a special power. Where most users tripping on F can see moments into the future, Julian begins the novel glimpsing two-and-a-half days ahead, and ends it envisioning the end of the universe itself: a Paul Atreides for the Fitzroy set.  

The relationship between drug culture and science fiction is difficult to untangle, since it’s hard to tell at any given moment which is influencing which. 1974’s Drug Themes in Science Fiction by Robert Silverberg is not the only survey of the subject, but it may be the most intriguing. Silverberg, himself a veteran of the genre, produced the monograph for the benefit of the United States’ National Institute on Drug Abuse. Silverberg insisted that the crossover was apolitical, noting that ‘Science fiction writers tend to be no more radical as a group than any other randomly selected cross-section of middle-class educated contemporary citizenry […] however forward-looking their fictional visions may be’. I don’t quite agree with Silverberg on this, although his point was less about the fiction than it was about the people who write it: he wasn’t about to narc on his mates. For Silverberg, drugs were just another part of the genre’s toolbox, which he categorised according to their speculative effects: euphorics, mind expanders, panaceas, mind controllers, etcetera. While there’s no category given for time travel, there are drugs in the survey that anticipate the effects of Big Time’s F, from Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Plutonian Drug’ (1934), to the addictive JJ-180 in Philip K. Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year (1966). What this extensive catalogue did show, and what Silverberg didn’t mention, was how much the genre resonated with various cultures of drug use, especially the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties: all are predicated upon accessing new worlds, or modes of consciousness.  

Simply by tracking the depiction of psychedelic experiences in the genre, we can expose a radical strain that connects science fiction to the counterculture at large. It’s no surprise that writer William S. Burroughs, dubbed the ‘godfather’ of punk, and a totemic figure to musicians like Kurt Cobain and Patti Smith, made use of science fiction’s imagery to tap its radical potential. For Burroughs, such images – star viruses, sonic weapons – were adjuncts to other departures from literary convention, a set of lenses through which to see encroaching postmodernity in all its malefic glory, but also maybe to glimpse an invisible escape route. ‘This is the space age,’ he declared, ‘Time to look beyond this rundown radioactive cop-rotten planet.’ 

For Prosser, the opposite seems true. The places where the book seems about to ‘look beyond’ are where its narrative turns back on itself – or, as one character says accusingly to Julian, ‘You can move through time […] see anything you want to see. But the only thing you care about seeing is yourself.’ This character portrait of Julian is well-executed, but it sits awkwardly beside the novel’s apocalyptic undertow. Big Time’s strangeness seems dialled down to suit a realist sensibility, which also dials down the radicalism that it talks up elsewhere. For instance, despite throwing down the gauntlet that time may not be a linear phenomenon, the narrative plays out in careful sequence – as if Prosser has anticipated reviewers wishing the mechanics of the plot were clearer and arranged things to accommodate them, rather than telling them, as any punk would, to get (head) fucked.  

So, the novel’s temporal strangeness recedes into the background, which might be a non-issue if it didn’t expose other hesitations. Ben Brooker observes in the Australian Book Review that, politically, it’s ‘never clear what the guiding principles of Big Time’s authoritarian regime are, nor how the resistance relates to them ideologically.’ On the one hand, it’s a relief to see Prosser treat the conservative swill fouling up the corridors of public life as a real threat. On the other hand, once you get past the bogeymen of cops and work camps, the Acceptables are pitted against a pretty nebulous form of censorship, one that flits between fascistic nation-building and farcically rejecting anything resembling creative expression – even Julian and Oriana can’t explain why the latter’s Phil Collins record is contraband. At times, it feels as if Prosser is less interested in engaging with the politics of his imagined world than he is in expressing his anxieties on the capabilities of art, drained of impetus by artists, executives, and audiences alike. There’s a bit of cultural cringe at play in the margins too: when one character fleeing Australia is asked what’s waiting in Europe, they reply, ‘Galleries […] Concerts. Restaurants. Ruins. Dying languages and ancient colosseums. Deep history. The opera. Music and ideas.’ It’s a litany that overlooks how what passes for high culture comes from the continent that also birthed the raw horrors of imperialism.  

Speaking of empire, it’s also hard to account for the novel’s lack of an Indigenous perspective, which Emma Rayward picks up on in her review for Meanjin: ‘While the reader hasn’t been given a blow-by-blow of the formation of the FREA, nor is one necessarily required, the absence of First Nations people raises questions.’ These questions are only ever addressed once as part of a longer flashback to Oriana’s youth:  

The erasure of Jandamarra here is one of the very few clues we get about the ideology of the FREA, alongside the fact that Queensland and the Northern Territory are renamed Cooksland. But it’s odd for a writer of apparent sensitivity to overlook what should be the central feature of any attempt to speculate on a future national identity, namely: what about the people whose land this is? Though this means Prosser avoids appropriating Aboriginal voices, his portrait of a homegrown rebellion consequently rings somewhat hollow, with no recognition of any Indigenous resistance beyond the nineteenth century.

Ironically, the novel participates in its own erasure of rebellion – by depicting the decline of the ability of artists to effectively rebel. To come back to labels, Prosser calls the novel a ‘lament’, implying the possibility of action has passed. The central tension is not so much between the Acceptables and the FREA, but between the band members themselves, particularly lead singer Ash, earnestly trying to express his politics, and Julian, whose arguments that the band should play it safe – ‘Not everything has to mean something, y’know’ – are predicated as much on his disregard for what art can really change as they are on his fear of reprisal. While Ash’s radical tendencies are undeniably caught up with his ego (and, it turns out, his relationship with Oriana), it’s difficult to sympathise with Julian. Prosser is aware of this – he’s not trying to sell us on Julian’s cynicism, but rather, paint a real portrait of someone, in his words, ‘becoming less creative, less passionate, less radical.’ While that portrait is well-realised, it’s an awkward fit in a world otherwise so open to radical alternatives. If the arc of the novel plays out the tragedy of a self-centred artistic culture – Julian ultimately throws away the chance to ignite the rebellion to promote his own music instead – then why does the novel need the topoi of science fiction at all?

Of course, given the shit hitting the fan here, in the United States, and elsewhere, Prosser’s broader anxieties about our limited capacity to effect change ring true. We’re all getting painfully reacquainted with the fact that radical thought doesn’t always follow through into life – consider the music industry, or better yet, science fiction. It’s been difficult watching luminaries of the genre remain silent about genocide and civil war, leaving those in more precarious positions to speak up: younger writers, writers from the Global South, small press, and so on. Whether operating in the stratosphere of space opera or the streets of the near future, I don’t think science fiction can plead that this isn’t our business. The genre of the technological moment (space year 2025!) shouldn’t merely have something to say but something to do. I don’t mean writing the future we want to see, in some sort of hazy wish fulfilment, or even writing the roadmap to that future – too many reduce the genre to aphorisms about just this. I mean writing the invisible images, rendering the unthinkable or unimaginable in solid blocks of prose, even abandoning writing altogether. The best method for dealing with the current crises may well be to load up on exotic substances and start committing felonies. Tell them you’re putting coded messages in book reviews and watch them scramble – where will the fuckers strike next?

Therein lies the trouble for Big Time. It could well be argued that the FREA and the trouble created by F and Extreme Coincidence are merely meant to lend greater weight to the tragedy of Julian selling out, but these bold ideas are indebted to a generic tradition that haunt the novel with the sense of roads not taken, underscored by Big Time’s road movie sensibility and its glimpses of other timelines through the throes of headier F-trips. These paths not followed kept reminding me of other fiction I should be getting round to, including the aforementioned small press or online publications, although even they may not deliver the requisite blow to the head. 

Science fiction intersects with rock’n’roll in the act of something like surrealism: the frantic assemblage of half-glimpsed realities. But Big Time’s glimpses never quite feel like enough of an attack on the ordinary. It’s become a cliché, for instance, that Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic Left Hand of Darkness (1969) compels us to rethink the gender binary, but we forget that Le Guin achieves this by having her protagonist undergo, among other things, a sweaty psychedelic experience, complete with yonic hallucinations, and a near-suicidal subarctic trek where he must teach his genderfluid companion telepathic powers. The power and appeal of the genre is knowing how to cut loose – literally in Burroughs’ case, cutting and folding pulp sci-fi into other texts and his own writing to create textual collages that were the basis of much of his 1960s work. It isn’t a question of merely imagining, but letting imagination get its hands dirty in the detritus of the world, whether it’s pop music or designer drugs. Whatever we want to call these acts of speculation, they all have a root in derangement, in some fundamental disagreement with the presumed conditions of reality. Burroughs said of his cut-up method that when you cut up the present, the future leaks out. I think that when we cut up reality, something more real leaks out: conditions of oppression, modes of liberation, other life-forms, voices in our heads. Big Time is half-submerged in this part-punk legacy, but it keeps coming up to breathe airs and graces that even the novel itself doesn’t seem too impressed with. It’s a laudable debut, but Prosser, and writers like him, should feel emboldened to dive deeper. There may be no other way out.