My grandparents were born at the end of the 19th century, in the era of the horse and cart. My mum and dad grew up in the machine age of mass production. And I was a child of the space age.
Despite the trials of world wars and the spectre of nuclear annihilation that followed it, this was a dispensation of steadily increasing prosperity, safety and mobility. For my family, at least, it was an experience of liberation and improvement, a trajectory that reinforced faith in human progress. For each succeeding generation, prospects were enhanced. Life got better.
Well, that arc of improvement stopped with my kids. You could call it the end of a dream. But really, itās the death of a communal delusion.
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The world I was born into is not the one Iām passing on to my grandkids. The conditions of safety I inherited will not be granted to them. This is the most confronting fact of my life.
The reasons for this awful diminution of prospects are well known. The world has sickened because of the way weāve generated energy to drive all this prosperity and improvement. The arc of progress we once lauded hid an underbelly of despoliation, oppression and theft. All that success was bought at the cost of a scorched Earth.
The world is already 1.5Ā°C hotter than it was when my grandparents were born. On current settings, weāre tracking to double that level of heating. A world as hot as ours is already chaotic and deeply challenging for ecosystems and the creatures that depend on them. A planet with twice our level of heating is a nightmare we should avoid at all costs. Because it means some parts of the globe will be all but uninhabitable. Many millions of humans will die. Billions will live in conditions of misery.
Some of them will be my descendants. Thatās the hook for me. The idea that my safety and mobility might have been bought at the price of their suffering. That upsets me. Juice is my family nightmare.
Now there may be places on our planet where the reality of our burning world can still be overlooked or evaded. Australia is not one of them.
In north-west Australia, where I live, the climate has already grown extreme. Yesterday it was 50Ā°C. Because of increased storm intensity, homes are almost uninsurable.
When people ask me why, so late in my career, Iāve published a dystopian novel, I must temper my response and mask my irritation. They want to know why Iāve changed tack, why Iāve suddenly switched genres. Well, the thing is, I havenāt. Whatās changed is not my writing ā itās the world around me. The real question is, at this moment in history, how can I not write like this? What sort of an artist would I be if I ignored the conditions of life around me?
Is Juice a dystopian novel? You can call it that if you like. But this assumes thereās something fantastical, or outlandish, about it. And I donāt see it that way. Not with millions of humans living in dystopian conditions already. All over the world people are starving, fleeing conflict and climate extremes. In almost every instance, the horrors they face are the legacy of fossil capitalism. Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia as an opiate. It serves as a softener, an instrument of distance. And I donāt think we can afford it.
Juice is set generations from now in north-west Australia. The hard work of avoiding the worst of climate breakdown has not been done and after heating by 3Ā°C, the world has tipped into feedback loops that make it hotter still. Nation states have collapsed. Human settlement has retreated from the equatorial regions, and those who persist at the margins ā say, the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer ā must live several months of the year underground. Theyāre actually pretty good at it. But itās very tough.
Like most of my novels, itās a story of family. Itās about the pressures of loyalty and liberty, geography and history. So, hardly a departure. And if itās speculative in its framing, its speculations are not just scientific or climatic but moral and deeply personal. Iāve forced myself to imagine the lives my grandkidsā children will lead. Right here, in a landscape I love and have defended for most of my adult life.
To me, itās a logical, emotional and imaginative extension of the world I know. Supplemented by the science and climate modelling, it reflects my experience of living in the Pyrocene in a part of the world thatās always been climatically extreme but is now on track to becoming uninhabitable.
The world of Juice is harsh. Its people are hardy and stoical. Out of tradition and stubbornness, they hold on at the margins of habitability. But as conditions deteriorate, families are forced to migrate southward in the hope of finding cooler air and viable settlements.
Thatās not speculation. In northern Australia, itās already happening. And the people being forced to migrate like Steinbeckās Okies, are our poorest citizens. So Iām just turning the dial a little.
For all that, the greatest challenge my characters face is not climatic ā itās human. For as our hero discovers, the most valuable assets are not shelter or food or even water, but civility. This, I guess, is the heart of the novel.
What makes life sustainable is a shared sense of the common good. Fossil capitalism, the global force that curdled these peopleās world, is contemptuous of that ethic. To survive, my characters must rekindle it and treasure it. And so must we. Whether we can, of course, is the real matter of speculation.
Ā© Tim Winton
Tim Winton is the author of Juice (Picador), the February 2026 read for the New ŠÓ°ÉŌ““ Book Club. You can buy a copy , and sign up to read along with us here
