The recent burgeoning of dystopic future and climate fiction (or ‘cli-fi’) in film, TV and literature reflects the current direction of travel for the world and the rising anxieties accompanying this. Many different timeframes, settings, nations and contexts have been explored as part of this cultural phenomenon and one particular country, Australia, has featured strongly in many of these stories (perhaps the historical perceived remoteness and wildness of Australia, along with the vast scorched wastelands of the deep continental interior, lend themselves to stories of this kind). So much so in fact, that the label ‘Oz-pocalypse’ might be appropriate for a sub-genre of Australian-set or -inspired cli-fi and horror; key examples of which from different eras include On the Beach, the various entries in the Mad Max saga, The Rover, These Final Hours, 2067, Time Trap (short film), and Wolf Creek.
A major new entry to the Oz-pocalypse sub-genre was recently published, which may be one of the most profound works of cli-fi seen to date. This is the novel Juice (Tim Winton, Picador, 2024), which paints a vivid future history of a climate change-ravaged Australia, and wider world. It is a richly detailed, deeply sobering story that unfolds over 500 pages and encompasses an impressive range of themes, including societal transformations, stoicism under harsh conditions, merciless natural forces, revenge and justice, the echoes and long reach of crimes and selfish acts, personal loss and sacrifice, service and duty, human behaviour in the absence of law and authority, and the meaning of being human itself.
The following is an overview and summary of the main elements of Juice, to inform some thoughts on some of its most important themes (note: spoilers are kept to a minimum). The story follows a narrator/protagonist (who remains unnamed throughout) over the course of several decades, from his late teens through to middle age. The story revolves around the places where the narrator spends his formative years, and later expands out to cover locations around the globe, which allows world building to be undertaken by degrees. The structure of the story is unusual but works well; we meet the narrator right at the end of the final act of his story, and the deep settings and context, and the many steps leading to that point, are recounted as a remembered narrative.
The broad timeframe is not explicitly stated but is likely a century (or perhaps two) hence. The distant past (our current timeframe) is collectively remember through shared, half-believed stories or ‘sagas’, and is described alternately as both the ‘100 Years of Light’ and the ‘Dirty World’. At some point a prolonged period of collapse and chaos labelled as ‘the Terror’ is described as having engulfed the world, driven seemingly mostly by climatic breakdown, and much of the contemporary world order appears to have been swept away. Our narrator describes the region of his childhood as “…the Outer Cape, north of the 23rd parallel” (therefore potentially the North West Cape of Western Australia), which is in this climate-changed future is a hostile moonscape of sterile land bound by desertified mountains and an overheated ocean.
Despite its harshness, this region is sparsely inhabited by a tough, resourceful and stoic population eking a living from the land. The narrator lives with his mother on a remote farmstead where they collect water, generate solar power, raise chickens and grow staple crops and vegetables to trade for practical items with the dispersed local community. The nature of the many transformations that have rocked the world are slowly revealed in the descriptions of this life, such as the fact that all their cultivation takes place underground during winter, and the long summers are spent cowering in these underground spaces, struggling to endure and survive unspeakable heat. Nonetheless, the time and place that the narrator inhabits in his younger years is described as the ‘Long Peace’; a time of relative stability and order following the Terror.
Two key events later occur which change the narrator’s life journey; he is firstly approached by and recruited into ‘the Service’, and later meets, marries and has a child with an outsider who passes through his community. The Service is perhaps the central aspect of this story; part clandestine paramilitary force, part vigilante group, it operates on a high secretive, non-centralised basis and has global reach. It has a clear goal, which it is remorselessly pursuing, namely hunting down the scions and descendants of the super wealthy elites who fled to dispersed, hidden and fortified bunkers as the Terror (which these elites did so much to cause) unfolded. These bunkers, time capsules of our current era, have served as refuges for generations of descendants of these elites (the locations and family names associated with many of these targets are later revealed; they are grimly familiar), living confined but luxurious lives surrounded by heirlooms. However, when the Service tracks them down, summary justice is delivered without mercy.
The narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the Service with time, rising through the ranks, and in time leading multiple raids as a battle-hardened veteran. He lives a double existence of family life and work on the farmstead interspersed with deeply strenuous missions spread across this wasted future world. The Service is by necessity highly secretive, and the narrator has to provide his mother and wife with cover stories of lone material salvage missions roving across the empty and abandoned deserts of the Australian wilderness, to justify his long absences from the farmstead. His personal circumstances eventually go through a major rupture (and it is later revealed that the relationships between the various parts of his life had never been as he had imagined), sending him into a personal crisis he barely survives.
The final act of the story concerns shifts in many of the equilibria underpinning the narrator’s world. His relationship to the Service starts to change after a particularly harrowing mission, and in the wider world, climatic and societal conditions start to deteriorate once again, revealing the Long Peace to be just an interlude between unravellings. A key development in these later sections is the appearance of artificial humans of exquisite complexity; these are seemingly an innovation of surviving elites as a last ditch effort to defend themselves against the mortal threat of the Service. Whilst their true origins, numbers and nature remain uncertain, and the extent to which they are detested by biological humans is laid bare, it is implied that what future remains may belong to them. It is through serendipitous encounters with several of these artificial people that the narrator finds himself recounting his story as a last ditch effort to bargain for his life and another in his care. But to find out how this ends, you will have to read the book.
Juice is in every sense of the word an epic story that is clearly intended to highlight and chide the many follies of the current era, and the nature of the future we are currently all helping to shape. The central theme is that the short-sighted and self-serving actions, attitudes and systems of the present will create consequences that may well echo down generations and centuries, potentially leaving a bitterness that will not fade quickly in anyone who inherits this future. The attitudes and beliefs of this imagined future society, exemplified by the Service, drive them to commit violent vengeful acts because of a deep injustice they feel the need to put right.
The ire of these future people is likely directed against all those who contributed to the actions of the Dirty World, but the figureheads of late-stage capitalism become lightning rods for this because of their outsized role in the state of this future world, but also because of the continued survival of their bloodlines off the back off those distant crimes. The self-centred cowardice they showed by fleeing to refuges as the world burned in their wake likely just compounds this. It is therefore not just punishment for crimes remote in time, but for an ongoing one.
In addition to this central message, there are some additional and more subtle messages, and one which really stayed with me was around the way these future people react when confronted with curios from our era. After ‘eliminating’ their hapless billionaire progeny targets on a particular mission, our narrator and his fellow warriors explore the victim’s bunker and the artefacts it is filled with (such as sumptuous paintings, furniture, and great tanks of fossil fuels). Although their training has prepared them for such sights it is all clearly deeply alien and unsettling to people born into such a spartan world, and elicits only one response; destruction without hesitation. The Service aims to cleanse the world of the mistakes of the past to allow a better future to be established, but there seems to be an accompanying element of spite for the greed and carelessness that led to such items being created and hoarded.
It is this imagined hard-hearted, utterly unsentimental attitude towards the past and its relics that I found particularly interesting, and which should give us all something to think about. Societies today collectively place great reverence on heritage from the past, whether in the form of ideas, institutions, architecture, art, literature and other physical and cultural artefacts. This is because we recognise the value these gifts bring in defining our societies and place in history, but also because they are clearly the outputs of great labours of love. The unspoken flip side of this is that we hope, or expect, that the cultural and technological achievements that we cherish and hold so dear, and which are the products of our efforts and labours, will be similarly revered by our descendants.
The perspective that Juice presents is that our main legacy – a poisoned and degraded Earth – will likely ensure that the ideas and cultural artefacts that we also pass on to the future may not be treated with the same reverence or respect as we do now. Worse, they could become the reviled symbols of a culture deemed to mostly be destructive and short sighted. Many amongst us might say concerns such as this are too abstract to matter, and that worrying about how we’re thought of by people generations in the future, long after we are gone, is entirely unimportant compared to the urgent needs of the present. The counter to that might be that being remembered, whether individually or collectively, is a grasp at immortality, and right now it seems we’re doing everything we can to be collectively remembered for all the wrong reasons, or to be deliberately forgotten.
This is all however just a thought experiment; what is really important here is that epic stories such as Juice might prompt us to think about questions such as this, by making the character, motivations and passions of imagined future people feel so real and vivid. Those of us working against the clock to raise awareness of the global predicament and the coming polycrisis, have so far largely attempted to motivate action using data, scientific concepts, and appeals to logic. One thing is becoming ever clearer: it is not working rapidly enough. This is because humans need to feel emotionally energised and compelled before they act and make sacrifices to change the present and future, and one of the most effective ways to do that is via storytelling and appeals to cultural touchstones. In that spirit, Juice is a must read for all those with an interest in our predicament; it will leave you with images you won’t forget, and make you think about the future in ways you haven’t before – highly recommended.
