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A chilling, near‑future dystopia where civic duty becomes coercion, technology blurs the meaning of being human, and the state decides when your life should end. Tim Bragg’s The Experience pushes familiar anxieties to their logical — and deeply unsettling — conclusion. Anthony C Green reviews the novel.
Introduction
I enjoyed Tim’s last novel, The Mirror, a lot, and like Tim, based on our online interactions. He’s an all-round talented guy, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and recording artist as well as a seasoned writer of both fiction and non-fiction. So, I was looking forward to reading this and, thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed.
Overview
Like all good Speculative/Science/Dystopian fiction, the novel takes our world as it is now, or at least the most technologically ‘advanced’ parts of it, adds a prescient selection of the political/social issues that currently concern us, and projects that forward into a plausible future world.
The decision to make that future the relatively near future, the novel being set at some point during the 2060s, is a good one, given the pace of and scale we have seen in recent decades. It also serves to make the ‘new normal’ depicted in the story seem perhaps less unlikely and less terrifying than it ought to be.
For those who have never known a world very different to the one we now find ourselves in, or have perhaps have been gently cajoled and coerced into, anyone say under the age of thirty or so, some of it might even seem quite an inviting prospect.
For me, that’s perhaps the most worrying takeaway from the novel of all.
2066 is thirty years away at the time of writing. Think back to 1996. The first brick-like, not-yet-Smart mobile phones were starting to make an appearance, mostly among younger people, including fellow staff members at my then place of work.
In my mid-thirties at the time, I well remember a conversation that took place out back as we seized the opportunity for a quick smoke, involving myself and two or three fellow support workers of around my age. We were all in agreement that we wouldn’t be rushing to join this new-fangled Mobile Telephone fad: ‘I don’t see the point. Who wants to have people ringing you up when you’re out? Especially work. It’d be like being permanently tracked…’ said one female colleague.
She was bright, attractive and, it turns out, a prophet.
I regularly attended a Creative Writing evening class back then, and the Star-Writer word processor I used to produce my assignments, all saved to floppy discs that, confusingly, weren’t floppy at all, was the height of technological progress for me.
It would be three years before I attained my first bulky Windows ’98 home PC at almost the same time that the needs of my job forced me to relictally join club-mobile.
It’s been a foot-to-the-floor dash down the Information Superhighway (a once ultra-modern term now barely remembered) ever since.
A dash to where?
To a world where it’s become all-but impossible to live offline, and where the threat of being ostracised and banished into thae wilderness has become a powerful weapon in the hands of governments and giant, unaccountable transnational corporations, the threat of being socially cast out, de-banked, denied work or even deprived of liberty for a careless, online heat of the moment response to a real-world outrage, or through the unearthing of a comment, word or turn of expression you once presented in the digital Public Square which might have been quite acceptable at the time but, for reasons we are often not even fully aware of, certainly isn’t now.
Of course, not everything about this technological revolution is bad, but if we’d have known then where we were headed, would we have taken those first baby steps?
And, of course, our Long Trip into the unknown may barely have begun.
If anything, given that, especially with the advent of AI, which plays a big part in the novel, technological change escalates exponentially, perhaps reaching a quasi-religious End/New Beginning point in the Singularity, the 2060s may be a conservative estimate of how long it will take to reach the reality envisioned in The Experience.
Themes
So, that’s one idea that is explored in the novel, how quickly and readily human beings can come to accept what would once have been seen as, well, as the stuff of dystopian science-fiction.
There are many others.
This is very much philosophical SF in the tradition the great Philip K Dick, a comparison that has rightly been made on the back-blurb of the novel. The book raises questions about the nature of being, about what it means to be human and to be alive, and about the inevitable truth that we all, at some point, must face the question of what it might mean to be not alive.
Is it to be everlasting nothingness, or might we find ourselves transported into a new reality where we realise that all those small things and Big Questions we spent so much of this life worrying about were really just a fuss about nothing, that what we thought was it, was an infinitesimally small part of a perhaps infinite adventure, like taking a single grain of sand for the desert, a molecule of water for the ocean, or a single planet for the Galaxy.
The Story
This is, of course, a review of a novel, so I suppose I’d better say a little bit about the plot as well as the themes and subtext, though I’ll try to do so briefly, without giving away too many spoilers.
The main plotline concerns Jim and his wife Hannah. Jim is fifty-nine, and in this possible reality the National Government, which is merely a sub-branch, exists mainly to enforce the will of an all-powerful World Government, has mandated that all citizens must, for the good of the whole, sacrifice their lives at the age of sixty.
This has become known as one’s Civic Duty, the sort of innocuous term, suggestive of Sunday morning litter-picks or volunteering for the National Trust, which it is all too easy to imagine such a once unthinkable measure being branded.
That the necessity for this Civic Duty has become broadly accepted, especially but not exclusively by those for whom the age of sixty still seems like a distant horizon not yet worth worrying about, is partly due to the development of something called Future Fields, or Double-F.
Double-F is essentially the spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of humane but premature extinction go down. Developed through a combination of AI/VR technology and psychedelic drugs, Double F enables the racks of corpses preserved in drawers in vast storage spaces to experience a form of synthetic half-life after the quiet demise of their physical bodies.
The preparation for and execution of Civic Duty and Double-F has been sub-contracted by the World/National government to a gigantic private corporation called Portway which, while distant and shadowy as a whole, as a whole, as large corporations tend to be, and merely a component of something still more large and shadowy, at least offers the personal touch through a skilled team of doctors, nurses, therapists, and what might be described as psychic designers. The specific team assigned to the individual to work with him/her in both preparation for their obligatory end once they pass their fifty-ninth year, and in developing the form of Double-F into which they are soon to be initiated.
That’s the extra sweetener that helps to normalise the process, that the individual is as involved as they wish to be, or at least can be at current levels of development, in the design of the artificial pseudo-life they are about to enter: Who else do they want to be present? How would they like to spend their time? What sort of physical environment do they wish to spend it in?
In the novel, we get to see this process unfold through the eyes of Jim, and to explore its effect on Hannah, who by virtue of being nine years younger than her husband, still has a reasonable amount of time to go before she has to start thinking about her own post-life Experience.
At the time in which the novel is set, Double-F is still in its relative infancy, and Jim can only expect his personal experience to last for approximately five years. So, it doesn’t end the question of what, if anything, comes after physical death. It merely kicks the can down the road as, I think, Jim himself says at some point.
If anything, it raises new questions: Can one die in Double-F, and if so, would this be death-proper, or would it be more akin to dreaming of dying in this life?
To return to a point I made in the introduction, to many, particularly to those who lack any form of religious Faith in a traditional form of afterlife, the idea of one that is synthetic but guaranteed could seem quite a decent trade-off for an early exit.
However, as is also true of most religious ideas of a life beyond this life, there is no certainty that an individual’s Double F will be entirely benign.
There are also various sub-plots at work, including some detective work by Jim and Hannah as regards potentially shady goings on within Portway, as well clear topical references within the book as regards the conduct of our own shadowy elite-class, with more than a hint of Epstein’s Island about some of the later sections of the novel.
I’ll leave the reader to explore these for themselves. It’ll be well worth your time. The characters are believable, and the plot exists as more than a convenience on which to explore ontological questions.
Modern Moral/Political Parallels
The most prescient of these is the Assisted Dying Bill here in the UK. At the time of writing, this Bill has just been returned to the House of Commons for amendment after being rejected by the Lords.
There are of course, the usual assurances that such a course of action would be entirely voluntary, and there are plenty of seemingly humane reasons why people might support such an option being made available, for instance to those who are terminally ill and have nothing more to look forward to than months, or years of misery and pain before natural death occurs. It’s on such cases that Bill is being sold to MPs and the public.
Everybody is free to have their own opinion on this issue. But the example of abortion is I think instructive. Whether one supports the principle of ‘a woman’s right to choose’ or not, it’s undeniable that we’ve travelled a long way from the ‘exceptional circumstances’ terms of the 1967 Abortion Act that first made the practice legal in Britain.
And, in countries where some form of ‘assisted dying’ has been introduced in recent years, like Canada and the Netherlands, we have seen the same sot of slippery slope at work, though in a much-accelerated fashion, to the point where it is now being offered to those with entirely treatable conditions like depression and/or drug/alcohol addiction.
In the back story, the world-building aspects of The Experience, we discover that the introduction of Civic Duty, initially at the age of eighty, followed a series of wars and economic crises.
Given similar scenarios in our world, which are not only plausible but may already have begun, how soon could ‘offered’ become ‘suggested’, and how soon would ‘suggested’ become ‘mandated’?
As these things take on a life (pun intended) of their own, as with the journey from the Nokia-brick to the permanent tracking device/multi-media entertainment device/access to the sum of all (approved by ‘verifiable sources’) of human knowledge we willingly carry in our pockets, we may not even need such a period of crisis to get there.
That’s my tuppence-worth, anyway.
Conclusion
Politics aside, The Experience is an excellent, well-constructed, well-written, and thought-provoking novel. If you enjoyed The Mirror, you’ll enjoy this even more. If you’ve given prior thought to some of these Big Questions, and have perhaps explored states of consciousness beyond what the American Zen Philosopher Alan Watts termed ‘Wet Monday morning consciousness, by whatever means, you’ll enjoy it all the more.
Review by Anthony C Green July 2026.
