Tim Winton: “Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia like an opiate”

My grandparents were born at the end of the 19th century, in the era of the horse and carriage. My mom 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 specter of nuclear annihilation that followed, it was about liberation from ever-increasing prosperity, security and mobility. At least for my family, it was an experience of liberation and improvement, a trajectory that strengthened faith in human progress. Prospects improved for each successive generation. Life got better.

With my children, this arc of improvement stopped. You could call it the end of a dream. But in reality it is the death of the communal delusion.

The world I was born into is not the one I am passing on to my grandchildren. The security conditions I inherited will not be provided to them. This is the most confronting fact of my life.

The reasons for this dire decline in prospects are well known. The world has gone mad because of the way we have been creating the energy that drives all this prosperity and improvement. The arc of progress we once praised hid an underworld of devastation, oppression and theft. All that success was bought at the cost of a scorched earth.

The world is already 1.5°C warmer than when my grandparents were born. With the current setup, we are looking at doubling this heating level. A world as hot as ours is already chaotic and profoundly demanding on ecosystems and the creatures that depend on them. A planet with twice the level of heating is a nightmare that should be avoided at all costs. Because it means that some parts of the globe will be almost uninhabitable. Many millions of people will die. Billions of people will live in conditions of misery.

Some of them will be my descendants. That’s the catch for me. The idea that my safety and mobility could be bought at the price of their suffering. That makes me angry. Juice is my family’s nightmare.

Now there may be places on our planet where the reality of our burning world can still be overlooked or avoided. Australia is not one of them.

In North West Australia, where I live, the climate is already extreme. It was 50°C yesterday. Due to the increased intensity of storms, houses are almost uninsurable.

When people ask me why I published a dystopian novel so late in my career, I have to tone down my answer and mask my irritation. They want to know why I changed direction, why I suddenly changed genres. The thing is, I don’t have one. What has changed is not my writing – it is the world around me. The real question is, at this point in history, how can I not write like this? What kind of artist would I be if I ignored the conditions of life around me?

is Juice dystopian novel? You can call it that if you want. But that assumes there is something fantastical or bizarre about it. And I don’t see it that way. Not when millions of people are already living in dystopian conditions. All over the world, people are starving, fleeing conflicts and climatic extremes. In almost all cases, the horrors they face are a legacy of fossil capitalism. Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia like an opiate. It serves as a softener, a distance tool. And I don’t think we can afford that.

Juice takes place in North West Australia from today. The hard work to avoid the worst climate meltdown has not been done, and after warming by 3°C, the world has tilted into feedback loops that make it even warmer. Nation-states collapsed. Human settlement has retreated from the equatorial regions, and those who remain on the fringes—say, in the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer—must live underground for several months of the year. They’re actually pretty good at it. But it is very difficult.

Like most of my novels, it’s a family story. It is about the pressures of loyalty and freedom, geography and history. So barely leaving. And if he is speculative in his framing, his speculations are not merely scientific or climatic, but moral and deeply personal. I forced myself to imagine the lives my grandchildren’s children would lead. Right here, in the landscape I love and have defended for most of my adult life.

For me, it is a logical, emotional and imaginative extension of the world I know. Complete with scientific and climate modelling, it reflects my experience of living in the Pyrocene in a part of the world that has always been climatically extreme but is now on its way to becoming uninhabitable.

World Juice he is rough. Its people are persistent and stoic. Due to tradition and stubbornness, it is kept on the edge of habitability. But as conditions worsen, families are forced to migrate south in the hope of finding cooler air and viable settlements.

This is not speculation. This is already happening in northern Australia. And the people who are forced to migrate like Steinbeck’s Okies are our poorest citizens. So I’m just going to turn the dial a little bit.

Through it all, the biggest challenge my characters face isn’t climate—it’s human. For, as our hero discovers, the most valuable assets are not shelter, food or even water, but civilization. That, I think, is the crux of the novel.

What makes life sustainable is a shared sense of the common good. Fossil capitalism, the global force that has brought these people’s world down, is contemptuous of this ethic. In order for my characters to survive, they have to bring it to life and cherish it. And so we must. Whether we can is, of course, a matter of speculation.

© Tim Winton

Written by Tim Winton Juice (Picador), February 2026 reading for the New Scientist Book Club. You can buy a copy hereand sign up to read along with us here

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