cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/26210457

People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future, I mean – courtesy of something very similar to the internet? This is the possibility Paul B Rainey floats in There’s No Time Like the Present, in which a crowd of misfits from Milton Keynes (once the future itself) are able, if not to visit Mars, then at least to watch episodes of Doctor Who that have not yet been screened.

Mordant and misanthropic in almost equal measure, Rainey’s book has three central characters, each one somewhat stuck, unable fully to escape their childhood. Barry, an obnoxious lazybones, still lives at home with his parents; he makes his living selling bootleg recordings of TV shows he has lifted from the “ultranet”, which provides entry to the future. Cliff, Barry’s friend, and a yoghurt-addicted woman called Kelly live together in her new house, but they’re not a couple; while he secretly pines for her, he’s only her tenant. In the evenings, they watch, with varying degrees of guilt, future episodes of their favourite series (Doctor Who in his case, Emmerdale in hers): tapes pressed on them by the grisly Barry.

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There’s No Time Like the Present isn’t a new book; it came out originally in 2015. But Rainey’s career has taken an extraordinary turn. In 2020, he won the Observer/Faber graphic short story prize, after many decades of making comics (he’s a regular contributor to Viz, the influence of which is sometimes detectable in his work). In 2023, Drawn & Quarterly published his graphic novel Why Don’t You Love Me?, and soon afterwards it was announced that Jennifer Lawrence was to develop it as a feature film. Now D&Q has stepped in with this beautiful new edition of an old book – which is neat in the context of its subject.