'One morning, the residents of a coastal small town wake to discover the sea has disappeared, leaving them 'landlocked'. However, the narrator has been seeing visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet? Does she have a disorder that skews her perception of time (the 'Dyschronia' of the title). Or is she just a liar?
'Mills' novel takes contemporary issues of resource depletion and climate change and welds them to one young woman's migraine-inducing nightmares. Her narrator's prevision anticipates a world where entire communities are left to fend for themselves: economically drained, socially fractured, trapped between a hardscrabble past and an uncertain future.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: Tell the emperor that my hall has fallen to the ground. Phoibos no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay, nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up. -The Phthia's last oracle at Delphi, 362 AD.
Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)
'Sam Warren wakes one morning to discover that her mother, Ivy, has broken into her house. It’s been years since Sam last saw her. Longer still since her mother walked out, 'saying she needed time, as if time wasn’t everywhere, seeping into every crevice'.' (Introduction)
'Reading this book transported me to the days when I read fiction before studying it, under tables at school, in the library, on the porch smoking cigarettes while my parents were sleeping, wondering how surreal yet possible all these fictional worlds seemed. I thought about this moment in my life while reading Dyschronia (2018) simply because devoting one’s life to learning how to write inevitably jeopardises the sense of mystery that one initially found alluring.' (Introduction)
'If the literary technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ is the usual means through which writers jolt people into seeing the world anew, how does a dystopian novelist shock us into seeing the environmental extremities of today, when ‘extremes’ are increasingly the norm? Furthermore, how can such a writer hope to contribute something original to our long tradition of dystopian fiction, and its rapidly growing sub-genre of ‘Cli-Fi’[1]? Jennifer Mills has taken on these challenges with her new novel, Dyschronia. This striking title refers to the novel’s structural and thematic preoccupation with temporal disorder, while cleverly alluding to both the novel’s genre and to the feeling of ‘dysphoria’ experienced by its protagonist, Sam (66) – that deep sense of ‘unease’ which provokes, and should be provoked by, dystopian stories.' (Introduction)
'In our era of climate change, prophecies about our future are commonplace. Scientists are our key prophets nowadays – though they are often repudiated or betrayed, like the religious prophets of old – but writers also increasingly offer their prognostications. Dyschronia, the third novel by the Australian writer Jennifer Mills, is another contribution to the future-oriented genre of cli-fi or climate-change fiction. Future gazing is also thematised by Mills’ novel.' (Introduction)
'Recent years have seen the literary novel begin to mutate, its boundaries and subject matter evolving in new and sometimes surprising directions as it attempts to accommodate the increasing weirdness of the world we inhabit.' (Introduction)
'A looping, surrealist vision of a small town wracked by climate change lays bare our collective myopia about the future.'
Jennifer Mills
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2018
14753561
2018
single work
interview
podcast
'In this interview, Jennifer discusses her writing process, reflects on her different approaches to fiction and non-fiction, and offers advice to emerging writers who are pitching to literary journals.' (Introduction)
'Every other day, it seems, a new controversy erupts around the programming decisions of one or another of Australia’s ever-proliferating literary festivals. If the object of outrage is not an unrepresentative panel discussion, it’s a politically contentious keynote, or else a disastrous clash between ill-suited speakers. Whatever the specifics, the regularity with which such brouhahas flare up speaks to our anxieties about what purpose literary festivals serve.' (Introduction)
