A man named JW Dunne once had several troubling dreams that came inexplicably true: his watch stopping at an exact time; a factory catching fire in Paris; a volcano erupting on the island of Martinique. These prophetic experiences urged him to write An Experiment with Time, a 1927 book that – though its scientific hypotheses were entertained but roundly rejected – piqued the interest of literary figures from Jorge Luis Borges to HG Wells. It scratched at the question: what if we experience time beyond the present moment?
Jordan Prosser’s debut novel, Big Time, takes that inquiry a step to the left: what if a drug could do that instead? In this lush, narcotics-dense, psy-fi trip of a book, a new eyedropper-applied substance called “F” enables its users to snatch glimpses of the future. The certainty of a vision isn’t guaranteed and experiences vary: most users lurch forward a few seconds or minutes. But the novel’s protagonist Julian – the earnest yet arrogant bassist of a newly famous band, the Acceptables – can stretch weeks, months, even years into the then.
