What do you think?
The Experience
Jim, born at the dawn of the 21st century, is nearing his 60th birthday with considerable apprehension. He’s been spared state euthanasia but must instead enter Future Fields - a partially understood virtual ‘afterlife’ enabled by drugs and nanotechnology interfaced with his brain. Though he has helped design this digital world, his body will soon lie in a drawer-like chamber, his consciousness transferred into this new ‘reality’. Whether this realm will be paradise, purgatory, or something darker remains uncertain.
England’s long decline has left Jim weary, yet he still places his faith in his wife, Portway, the doctor, and the system overseeing his fate - one that seems already sealed.
---
‘The Experience’ did exactly what a book of this nature is supposed to do - pulling the reader in from the first page. It teased out things to come and it got me turning page after page as I wanted to see what happened (and not be interrupted!). I was excited to both understand and then be inside this other reality. I wanted to know where it would all lead. And even beyond all that I could see the connections to our world right now. My God! Am I in a ‘drawer’ right now and this [experience] is not real?
A great and unexpected follow up to ‘The Mirror’ which has some similar themes that needed to be explored more. And who knows, Tim Bragg may well have tapped into something that could be reality in the not-too-distant future.
Also loved the idea of Civic Duty – with the fear [that the legal age] might go down again. Sure enough Bragg had thought and written about that later in the novel.
It’s definitely something a writer like Philip K Dick would write should he be alive now. And the quality of writing and editing raises the bar. Bragg’s writing is definitely on an upwards trajectory.
(Kirk S. King writer/editor)
---
Tim Bragg once again proves his storytelling prowess in The Experience, just as he did in The Mirror. With a keen sense of pacing and a gift for crafting believable, compelling characters, Bragg draws readers into richly imagined worlds that unfold with quiet intensity. What sets his work apart is his ability to weave profound philosophical questions seamlessly into the narrative—never pulling us out of the moment but embedding the ideas within the action itself. The Experience arrives at a crucial time, confronting the pressing challenges facing humanity with a sense of urgency and insight that feels both timely and necessary.
(Mike Fiorito – UFO Symphonic)
---Are we a burden at 60? Could it become our duty to die for the greater “good”?
The Experience imagines a near-future Britain shaped by the growing acceptance of state euthanasia. Jim, approaching 60, faces a mandated death sentence - but he has one escape. Through AI, computer technology and hallucinogenic drugs, he can retreat into a constructed world inside his own mind, funded by insurance secured by his wife.
As Jim struggles to reconcile love, mortality and the loss of a normal life, his family is forced to confront their own fears. His wife fights to protect him. Their daughter grows up in a society that seems only to promise a legal death. Their son, living abroad, faces uncertainty in a world that feels increasingly unstable. No character remains unchanged; loyalties shift, convictions falter, and nothing unfolds as expected.
The novel questions the relationship between the individual and the state - and whether a society that eliminates the old and vulnerable can remain humane.
England’s long decline has left Jim weary, yet he still places his faith in his wife, Portway, the doctor, and the system overseeing his fate - one that seems already sealed.
---
‘The Experience’ did exactly what a book of this nature is supposed to do - pulling the reader in from the first page. It teased out things to come and it got me turning page after page as I wanted to see what happened (and not be interrupted!). I was excited to both understand and then be inside this other reality. I wanted to know where it would all lead. And even beyond all that I could see the connections to our world right now. My God! Am I in a ‘drawer’ right now and this [experience] is not real?
A great and unexpected follow up to ‘The Mirror’ which has some similar themes that needed to be explored more. And who knows, Tim Bragg may well have tapped into something that could be reality in the not-too-distant future.
Also loved the idea of Civic Duty – with the fear [that the legal age] might go down again. Sure enough Bragg had thought and written about that later in the novel.
It’s definitely something a writer like Philip K Dick would write should he be alive now. And the quality of writing and editing raises the bar. Bragg’s writing is definitely on an upwards trajectory.
(Kirk S. King writer/editor)
---
Tim Bragg once again proves his storytelling prowess in The Experience, just as he did in The Mirror. With a keen sense of pacing and a gift for crafting believable, compelling characters, Bragg draws readers into richly imagined worlds that unfold with quiet intensity. What sets his work apart is his ability to weave profound philosophical questions seamlessly into the narrative—never pulling us out of the moment but embedding the ideas within the action itself. The Experience arrives at a crucial time, confronting the pressing challenges facing humanity with a sense of urgency and insight that feels both timely and necessary.
(Mike Fiorito – UFO Symphonic)
---Are we a burden at 60? Could it become our duty to die for the greater “good”?
The Experience imagines a near-future Britain shaped by the growing acceptance of state euthanasia. Jim, approaching 60, faces a mandated death sentence - but he has one escape. Through AI, computer technology and hallucinogenic drugs, he can retreat into a constructed world inside his own mind, funded by insurance secured by his wife.
As Jim struggles to reconcile love, mortality and the loss of a normal life, his family is forced to confront their own fears. His wife fights to protect him. Their daughter grows up in a society that seems only to promise a legal death. Their son, living abroad, faces uncertainty in a world that feels increasingly unstable. No character remains unchanged; loyalties shift, convictions falter, and nothing unfolds as expected.
The novel questions the relationship between the individual and the state - and whether a society that eliminates the old and vulnerable can remain humane.
319 pages, Paperback
Published February 24, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 6, 2026
Tim Bragg’s The Experience is a smart, unsettling dystopia that hooks you fast with a premise that feels both futuristic and uncomfortably plausible: at a prescribed age, “Civic Duty” pushes citizens toward a corporate-managed limbo where the body is stored and the mind is sold “freedom.”
Bragg’s writing shines in the close, anxious perspective of Jim Holden as he tours Portway’s gleaming facilities—control rooms, “guardian angels,” and drawer-like “resting” compartments that blur the line between care and captivity. The tone balances dark humor with real emotional dread, and the book’s best moments come when it leans into big questions about identity, consent, and what “living” even means when experience becomes a product.
If you like speculative fiction that’s idea-driven but still character-led and that leaves you thinking long after the last page, The Experience is well worth your time.
Mike Fiorito, author of The Innerspace of Outerspace
Bragg’s writing shines in the close, anxious perspective of Jim Holden as he tours Portway’s gleaming facilities—control rooms, “guardian angels,” and drawer-like “resting” compartments that blur the line between care and captivity. The tone balances dark humor with real emotional dread, and the book’s best moments come when it leans into big questions about identity, consent, and what “living” even means when experience becomes a product.
If you like speculative fiction that’s idea-driven but still character-led and that leaves you thinking long after the last page, The Experience is well worth your time.
Mike Fiorito, author of The Innerspace of Outerspace
July 11, 2026
I found The Experience to be a real ‘page turner’ and an exciting read. It explores a world where ‘Civic Duty’ dictates the age at which a person’s life as we know it ceases. But with a twist, for those fortunate enough to be able to fund an alternative future existence. It is definitely food for thought!
August 10, 2026
Vital questions are raised by the theme of Tim Bragg’s unsettling new novel: where are we heading as a society? Where are today’s currents of socio-political thinking taking us? Will we allow ourselves to be simply swept along on a dystopian tide, or will we resist declining into a cultural abyss?
If the true and fundamental purpose of the novel is to raise the consciousness of the reader, as I believe it is, then The Experience (Sycamore Dystopia, February, 2026) pursues this objective admirably.
In 2024, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Tim’s previous novel, The Mirror which looks fifty years into the future to a soulless technocratic state of ‘supercities’, rampant AI, transhumanist programmes and ubiquitous surveillance systems spying constantly on citizens.
The timely topic of The Experience is euthanasia (otherwise known as assisted dying or assisted suicide) at a time when governmental attitudes to it are softening around the world and it’s become legal in some countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Colombia, Ecuador, Luxembourg, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, and some Australian states.
In bioethics, over the last decade, euthanasia has become the most prominent area of research against a background of controversy over the ethical, legal and moral issues involved. Although euthanasia goes against the Hippocratic oath, debate continues, for example, on the question of whether euthanasia should be ‘offered’ to people with disabilities and mental illnesses.
Where do you stop with such an ‘offer’? The Experience answers this question with chilling effect. You don’t stop.
In 2060, Jim Holden is nearing his sixtieth birthday with anxiety. In a society of insufficient resources, he’s been spared state euthanasia, but instead, under his Civic Duty at the required age, he will enter Future Fields, a virtual ‘afterlife’ enabled by psychedelic drugs and nano-technology and administered by the suggestively-named corporation Portway in league with a shadowy and remote National Government.
With everyone’s Civic Duty, society could function healthily again, Jim muses. Eventually, houses were freed up, doctors’ and hospitals’ waiting lists were reduced. Schools (while they existed) thrived educationally with fewer pupils, and roads became less congested: ‘Taking out the older population worked. There was a regular percentage that had to be terminated.’
Before long – being among those able to afford it – Jim will be placed in a morgue-like drawer, ‘at rest’ as the euphemism goes, in a kind of suspended animation half-way (Partway?} between life and death, his consciousness transferred to a new reality – until he dies.
But as Jim prepares for the ‘Experience’, assisted with alacrity by Portway’s personnel, designing his future internal world in every detail, he stumbles on an awful secret that the company would rather keep hidden. But the story’s conclusion and its implications are not at all what one might expect.
Tim is an accomplished wordsmith who scores highly with the existential critic. He paints a disturbing and cautionary picture of what Western society could be like in just a few decades’ time if it doesn’t pull back from certain ideological extremes being promoted today.
The action of The Experience moves at a brisk pace, with its rolling psychodrama of family subjugated by the state when democracy has fallen by the wayside, and of Jim struggling to come to terms with a predetermined fate that will fall also to his wife and children in due course.
Tim touches all the bases philosophically and technically, keeping ahead of questions that might occur to readers as they go along. He asks us to reflect on what we mean when we use the word ‘reality’, to whom we owe duty in the final analysis, how we define virtue in relationships with those closest to us, and if human values are simply self-delusion.
There’s potent criticism of unaccountable corporatocracy and apt warning of how an authoritarian government can reduce people to passive acceptance of their ordained lot – or how an acquiescent populace can facilitate authoritarian rule in the first place.
It seems clear where Tim stands in terms of a new world order. The doctor in charge of Portway, speaking to Jim at one point, says: ‘I can tell you that being at rest has taken a lot of internal pressure off the government. It can gradually build back our nation in a better way.’
‘Build back better’: a phrase made sinister when adopted by the World Economic Forum under its ‘Great Reset’ initiative, launched in 2020. This envisaged major social, economic and political reforms against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, and gave rise to claims about a global elite seeking to abolish private property and reduce the world’s population with the use of vaccines or other means. Well, a smaller population is easier to control and its services cheaper to run.
As a footnote to my reading of The Experience, I couldn’t help being reminded of the 1973 dystopian thriller movie Soylent Green, inspired by the 1966 sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, and set in a world of over-population, pollution and shortages of food, water and housing.
Soylent Green is a highly-processed food wafer produced for the masses by the Soylent Corporation. But it’s discovered that it’s made, not from plankton as described, but from the remains of humans euthanised at huge government clinics while being shown wraparound projections of their favourite colours and scenes of life as it used to be.
If the true and fundamental purpose of the novel is to raise the consciousness of the reader, as I believe it is, then The Experience (Sycamore Dystopia, February, 2026) pursues this objective admirably.
In 2024, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Tim’s previous novel, The Mirror which looks fifty years into the future to a soulless technocratic state of ‘supercities’, rampant AI, transhumanist programmes and ubiquitous surveillance systems spying constantly on citizens.
The timely topic of The Experience is euthanasia (otherwise known as assisted dying or assisted suicide) at a time when governmental attitudes to it are softening around the world and it’s become legal in some countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Colombia, Ecuador, Luxembourg, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, and some Australian states.
In bioethics, over the last decade, euthanasia has become the most prominent area of research against a background of controversy over the ethical, legal and moral issues involved. Although euthanasia goes against the Hippocratic oath, debate continues, for example, on the question of whether euthanasia should be ‘offered’ to people with disabilities and mental illnesses.
Where do you stop with such an ‘offer’? The Experience answers this question with chilling effect. You don’t stop.
In 2060, Jim Holden is nearing his sixtieth birthday with anxiety. In a society of insufficient resources, he’s been spared state euthanasia, but instead, under his Civic Duty at the required age, he will enter Future Fields, a virtual ‘afterlife’ enabled by psychedelic drugs and nano-technology and administered by the suggestively-named corporation Portway in league with a shadowy and remote National Government.
With everyone’s Civic Duty, society could function healthily again, Jim muses. Eventually, houses were freed up, doctors’ and hospitals’ waiting lists were reduced. Schools (while they existed) thrived educationally with fewer pupils, and roads became less congested: ‘Taking out the older population worked. There was a regular percentage that had to be terminated.’
Before long – being among those able to afford it – Jim will be placed in a morgue-like drawer, ‘at rest’ as the euphemism goes, in a kind of suspended animation half-way (Partway?} between life and death, his consciousness transferred to a new reality – until he dies.
But as Jim prepares for the ‘Experience’, assisted with alacrity by Portway’s personnel, designing his future internal world in every detail, he stumbles on an awful secret that the company would rather keep hidden. But the story’s conclusion and its implications are not at all what one might expect.
Tim is an accomplished wordsmith who scores highly with the existential critic. He paints a disturbing and cautionary picture of what Western society could be like in just a few decades’ time if it doesn’t pull back from certain ideological extremes being promoted today.
The action of The Experience moves at a brisk pace, with its rolling psychodrama of family subjugated by the state when democracy has fallen by the wayside, and of Jim struggling to come to terms with a predetermined fate that will fall also to his wife and children in due course.
Tim touches all the bases philosophically and technically, keeping ahead of questions that might occur to readers as they go along. He asks us to reflect on what we mean when we use the word ‘reality’, to whom we owe duty in the final analysis, how we define virtue in relationships with those closest to us, and if human values are simply self-delusion.
There’s potent criticism of unaccountable corporatocracy and apt warning of how an authoritarian government can reduce people to passive acceptance of their ordained lot – or how an acquiescent populace can facilitate authoritarian rule in the first place.
It seems clear where Tim stands in terms of a new world order. The doctor in charge of Portway, speaking to Jim at one point, says: ‘I can tell you that being at rest has taken a lot of internal pressure off the government. It can gradually build back our nation in a better way.’
‘Build back better’: a phrase made sinister when adopted by the World Economic Forum under its ‘Great Reset’ initiative, launched in 2020. This envisaged major social, economic and political reforms against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, and gave rise to claims about a global elite seeking to abolish private property and reduce the world’s population with the use of vaccines or other means. Well, a smaller population is easier to control and its services cheaper to run.
As a footnote to my reading of The Experience, I couldn’t help being reminded of the 1973 dystopian thriller movie Soylent Green, inspired by the 1966 sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, and set in a world of over-population, pollution and shortages of food, water and housing.
Soylent Green is a highly-processed food wafer produced for the masses by the Soylent Corporation. But it’s discovered that it’s made, not from plankton as described, but from the remains of humans euthanised at huge government clinics while being shown wraparound projections of their favourite colours and scenes of life as it used to be.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews