Tim Winton and speculative fiction may seem an odd combination. His novels excel at the here and now, depicting lives at the margins, young love and young parenthood, violence at the hands of fathers. But the harsh beauty of the western Australian landscape has long been a presence in his work, and Winton has also long highlighted his country’s fragility in the face of climate chaos, and been fiercely critical of the exploitation of Australia’s mineral wealth. So the cli-fi premise of Juice, his latest novel, could be a perfect Winton fit.
Set in an unspecified future, some centuries from now, the book opens on a man and a girl driving across a landscape blackened by ashes. The hellscape is worthy of the Mad Max franchise, with slave colonies springing up from the parched earth like termite mounds. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road here, too, in the black dust thrown up by the vehicle’s tyres, and in the child passenger, observing everything with a mute wariness.
