Tim Winton: ‘Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia as an opiate’

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, it’s the death of a communal delusion.

The world I was born into is not the one I’m 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 we’ve 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 1.5°C hotter than it was when my grandparents were born. On current settings, we’re 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. That’s 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 50°C. Because of increased storm intensity, homes are almost uninsurable.

When people ask me why, so late in my career, I’ve published a dystopian novel, I must temper my response and mask my irritation. They want to know why I’ve changed tack, why I’ve suddenly switched genres. Well, the thing is, I haven’t. What’s changed is not my writing – it’s 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 there’s something fantastical, or outlandish, about it. And I don’t 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 don’t 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 3°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 – say, the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer – must live several months of the year underground. They’re actually pretty good at it. But it’s very tough.

Like most of my novels, it’s a story of family. It’s about the pressures of loyalty and liberty, geography and history. So, hardly a departure. And if it’s speculative in its framing, its speculations are not just scientific or climatic but moral and deeply personal. I’ve forced myself to imagine the lives my grandkids’ children will lead. Right here, in a landscape I love and have defended for most of my adult life.

To me, it’s 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 that’s 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.

That’s not speculation. In northern Australia, it’s already happening. And the people being forced to migrate like Steinbeck’s Okies, are our poorest citizens. So I’m just turning the dial a little.

For all that, the greatest challenge my characters face is not climatic – it’s 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 people’s 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.

© Tim Winton

Tim Winton is the author of Juice (Picador), the February 2026 read for the New Scientist Book Club. You can buy a copy here, and sign up to read along with us here