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

My grandparents were born at the end of the 19th century, during the era of the horse and cart. My mother and father grew up in the age of mass production. And I was a child of the space age.

Despite the hardships of world wars and the specter of nuclear annihilation that followed, prosperity, security and mobility have continued to grow. For my family, at least, it was a liberating and improving experience, a trajectory that strengthened faith in human progress. For each succeeding generation, prospects have improved. Life has improved.

Well, that arc of improvement stopped with my kids. You could call it the end of a dream. But in reality, it is the death of a community illusion.

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

The reasons for this terrible decline in prospects are well known. The world has become sick because of the way we have generated energy to generate all this prosperity and improvement. The arc of progress we once praised hid an underbelly of dispossession, oppression and theft. All this success was bought at the price of a Scorched Earth.

It’s already 1.5°C warmer than when my grandparents were born. With current settings we aim to double this heating level. A world as hot as ours is already chaotic and represents a major challenge for ecosystems and the creatures that depend on them. A planet with a heating level twice our level is a nightmare that we should avoid at all costs. Because it means that parts of the globe will be virtually uninhabitable. Several million humans will die. Billions of people will live in conditions of poverty.

Some of them will be my descendants. That’s the hook for me. The idea that my safety and mobility could have been purchased at the cost of their suffering. This bothers me. Juice is my family nightmare.

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 northwest Australia, where I live, the weather has already become extreme. Yesterday it was 50°C. Due to the increased intensity of storms, homes are almost uninsurable.

When people ask me why, so late in my career, I published a dystopian novel, I have to temper my answer and mask my irritation. They want to know why I changed tactics, why I suddenly changed gender. Well, the fact is, no. What has changed is not my writing, it is the world around me. The real question is, at this moment in history, how can we not write like this? What kind of artist would I be if I ignored the living conditions around me?

East Juice a dystopian novel? You can call it that if you want. But that assumes that there is something fantastic, or extraordinary, about it. And I don’t see it that way. Not with millions of humans already living in dystopian conditions. All over the world, people are starving and fleeing conflict and climate extremes. In almost every case, the horrors they face are the legacy of fossil capitalism. Sometimes I think we use the word dystopia like an opiate. It serves as a softener, an instrument of distance. And I don’t think we can afford that.

Juice will take place generations from now in northwest Australia. The hard work to avoid the worst climate breakdown has not been done and after 3°C of warming, the world has slipped into feedback loops that make it even hotter. Nation states have collapsed. Human settlements have retreated from equatorial regions, and those that persist on the margins – for example the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer – must live several months per year underground. They’re actually pretty good at it. But it’s very hard.

Like most of my novels, it is a family story. It is about the pressures of loyalty and freedom, geography and history. So this is hardly a departure. And if its framework is speculative, its speculations are not only scientific or climatic but moral and deeply personal. I forced myself to imagine the life my grandchildren’s children will lead. Right here, in a landscape that 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. Supplemented by scientific and climate modeling, it reflects my experience living in the Pyrocene, in a part of the world that has always been climatically extreme but is now on the verge of becoming uninhabitable.

The world of Juice is hard. Its inhabitants are robust and stoic. By tradition and stubbornness, they remain on the fringes of habitability. But as conditions deteriorate, families are forced to migrate south in hopes of finding cooler air and viable settlements.

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

However, the biggest challenge my characters face is not climatic, it is human. Because as our hero discovers, the most valuable assets are not housing, food or even water, but courtesy. This, I suppose, is the heart of the novel.

What makes life sustainable is a shared sense of the common good. Fossil capitalism, the global force that has paralyzed the world of these peoples, despises this ethic. To survive, my characters must revive and cherish it. And us too. Whether we will achieve this, of course, is truly a matter of speculation.

© Tim Winton

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