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.
