Recently longlisted for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize, Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice is not — as Winton himself and critics have described it — hopeful and a “creative projection of ‘wondering…’’”. I don’t read it as gesturing toward an otherwise unknown future, either. Rather, it is primarily a representation of current middle-class climate anxiety that excises imperialism and racism from the climate crisis, and where women are killed, sexually assaulted, and narratively silent.

Juice and possibility

In Juice, the opportunity for climate action has passed. The setting is a cli-fi dystopian world, complete with an early signposted and narratively late-entry of sapient robots or “sims”. “Sims” is one of many newly-coined words, along with weed (“chuff”) and guns (“tools”) and fuel (“juice”) and water (“juice”) and willpower (“juice”) and energy (“juice”) and moral courage (“juice”).

The narrator, a man looking after a silent girl in the post-apocalypse, tells his life story, trying to convince another man holding a crossbow of the possibility for human redemption and the need for community: to not shoot them. The girl is silent, nameless, and it’s implied she’s been sexually abused. Early in the novel, proof of her being human comes from the “scalding rush” of urine she sends down the narrator’s leg.

Largely because of its framing, the narrative is plodding and static. The main plot is the narrator’s recruitment into a militarised pseudo-Marxist militia undertaking global assassination missions against the families who have caused the climate crisis. A late section of the novel features an almost endless list of companies responsible for bringing about the catastrophe, having knowingly buried climate science to further the profits of their shareholders and perpetuate the machinery of capitalism and extraction (Winton, at a launch event I attended, said the original title of Juice was The List). This is the didactic lesson of the novel, which will be read, primarily, by people who (on the whole) agree with the following propositions: action is needed in our world, and quickly; companies are destroying the world and its future; and in the face of all this, there is a human capacity to love, collectivise and care for one another.

In Juice, capitalism and the climate crisis are blamed on specific companies and their families/bloodlines as well as a failure of society to productively collectivise against them. In this sense, capitalism is depicted as ideological and feudalist. Imperialism and colonialism are largely absent as exploitative, complex more-than-human processes that exacerbate and fuel the climate crisis. The crisis affects a social, undifferentiated group who’ve been fucked by companies, corrupt governments and an indifferent/apathetic middle class.

According to this view, capitalism and power operate primarily from the top down, exploiting labour and holding the means of production, and resistance means the formation of collectives out of individuals. These collectives, Juice suggests, can deploy more active, and more violent, methods of protest.

To be fair, this attitude is a brave political position in so-called Australia, coming at a time when the right to protest has been under attack on several fronts. But in some sense Juice actually reserves judgement on violence. Winton, in an interview, says that Juice “is an attempt to shock people into thinking about that possibility [of violence]. It’s my way of saying, let’s save this before it gets to that”. His implication is that Juice, and the arts in general, can raise class consciousness, or at least foster an understanding that action must be taken soon before climate destruction — and violence — is inevitable.

But Winton’s notion of power also largely assumes the figure of the subject as the locus of agency and resistance, which has been widely critiqued by an array of thinkers and philosophies. This figure is typically masculine, white and abled, capable of exerting mastery and its self onto the nonhuman, inhuman, and not-yet conscious subject. This can be seen in the paternalistic “moral hero” of Juice, who has a big moment of moral courage when he finds a sim, the original guardian of the young girl, attractive (“Even in her baggy overalls, or the tunic and trousers I had traded for, it was evident how shapely her body was”) but chooses not to act on it. As he says to her:

I’ve done harm … Plenty. I’ve caused pain to others, those I love. I’ve done a lot of hard things. But truly, I don’t want to do you any harm. I promise, I won’t dishonour you.

The sim is later sexually assaulted and set on fire and killed. Overall, there is a religious humanism central to Winton’s work that co-exists with a white sexist masculism that is levelled at climate change. But it does not do enough to consider racism and sexism, how it is the similar logics of individual persons and goods, use-value, masculism, the nuclear family, that are messily entangled with what we call “capitalism”. It does not do enough to imagine new relations, commons, sociality and relations that swerve away from value that might offer different ways of living together.

Winton describes capitalism as “a big, abstract, wicked problem” and claims that the power of a novel is it “can solidify amorphous things in strange ways …” But solidifying the amorphous, chameleonic aspects of contemporary capitalism is not necessarily productive or radical. Juice is a representation of climate crisis and climate anxiety, but one that is not strange enough.

At the launch I attended, Winton kept returning to the term “possibility”: the possibility of literature, the possibility of speculative fiction, the possibility to resist capitalism. It is a term that usefully gestures towards my major issues with Juice and its politics. As Massumi outlines in Parables for the Virtual:

Possibility is a variation implicit in what a thing can be said to be when it is on target. Potential is the immanence of a thing to its still indeterminate variation, under way.

In other words, possibility is a mode of thinking where the causality between past and future has been pre-decided: where x leads to y, yet both terms are assumed and unquestioned. Juice begins with a concession, in which the future of the world is represented by an anthropocentric and masculinist notion of climate anxiety and resistance, resting on the same commonsense assumptions that assert a human will and mastery of the world that are, at the very least, co-conspirators of the climate-crisis, inherently violent and exploitative. While Juice portrays a possible future, it is a negative and reactionary one.

The politics of anxiety

Peter Sloterdijk argues in Stress and Freedom that we live in “stress commune[s]” in which varying “intense flow[s] of stress topics” — largely perpetuated by the mass media — ensure that the individualistic members of society attain some level of “synchronisation of consciousness”. This is done mostly through forces of “concern and excitation” that move and flow and regenerate. This stress allows the public to operate via a sort of affective central nervous system — or, as Brian Massumi puts it in Ontopower, a kind of “wirelessly jacked central government” — where people do not act as one body, but rather as varied, multiple bodies charged or incited by similar feeling.

This is not, however, an anxiety that stems from “moral panic”, or is foregrounded by ideology. Per Sloterdijk and Massumi, anxiety incites society to move, to take action, to agitate and excite. Anxiety produces movement that is simultaneously economically, institutionally and militarily captured or coded. This movement is required for the complex processual abstraction — with very real, material and violent effects and by-products — that capitalism has become.

Massumi, for example, writes that the impact of mass media’s coverage of numerous “unspeakable” horrors, such as environmental disasters, genocides and wars, is that “a vague foreboding … becomes the very medium of everyday life”. This vague foreboding is then used as an “open field” for “autocratic intervention and arbitrary exercises of power operating on a continuum with military force”. In other words, society’s anxiety is co-produced and bolstered by the mechanism of mass media to simultaneously be exploited (and continuously exacerbated) by the militarised State to exercise its power.

In so-called Australia, the neo-Nazi rallies outside NSW parliament  were subsequently used to attempt to justify further powers and laws to “shut down racist demonstrations”, despite extant powers not being used at the time. Meanwhile, NSW police have “wrongly categorised” pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic, and overall police abuse of protestors has increased. After the Bondi terror attack, the government legislated new hate speech laws while continuing to vilify pro-Palestine protests and activists.

Is there a more banally hypocritical way for the State to justify and use further powers to continue to enact racialised violence than via the Orwellian language of “social cohesion” and anti-violence?

Another of Massumi’s examples — here, in Ontopower — is the United States’s imperialistic and colonially extractive war in Iraq, whose justifications spoke primarily to the potential for future terrorist acts. The State harnesses indeterminate and unlikely possibility into anxiety to justify its pre-emptive action. It is the continuous action and agitation of the State that allows it to stave clear of “paralysis” and to continuously “calibrate” and modulate “the public’s anxiety”. One example of a mechanism that does this, Massumi writes, is the US’ colour-coded terror alert system introduced in 2002. Under the system, the uncertainty of terror acts can be raised or lowered by the State as necessary, allowing, at its height, near-absolute powers of militarised pre-emption. With such pre-emption, “the threat is still indeterminately in potential” and cannot be proven or disproven.

As with the case of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the feeling of anxiety thus evoked becomes independent to the reality of the threat. This is what Massumi terms an “effective operative logic”, where a “present effect” “compensates for the absence of an actual cause”.

The new hate speech laws allow the government, among other things, to categorise groups as hate groups. One metric by which groups can be designated as hate groups by ASIO is if they “are likely to increase the risk of politically motivated violence, or of the promotion of communal violence”. While not the sole or major benchmark of a hate group, this phrasing emphasises that the notion of risk is flexible: it can be calibrated by the State to pre-emptively repress, threaten or incite. The “effective operative logic” prioritises, justifies and co-produces the “present effect” of anxiety by chaining it to risk: risk which is here the anxiety of possibility.

A new art

As Maria Hynes and Scott Sharpe write in a paper on affect and economies of thought, there are two broad types of thinking. The first is characterised by anxiety: “apprehensiveness, angst and disquiet, with the assumption that this is the given state of affairs”. Anxiety, here, is the felt response of the infinite potential of uncertainty being suddenly limited by the “state of affairs”. This same anxiety is what sparks this mode of thinking in the first place — it is recursive. On the other hand, Hynes and Sharpe argue that “there is thought that is more expansive and generous, commensurate to the richness and plenitude of the world”.

In The Politics of Affect, Massumi argues that holding open potentiality in the present, without projecting outcomes, “gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see”. It “allows a margin of manoeuvrability” where pure “uncertainty can be empowering”. It is “hope” that differs to Winton’s: not “optimism” for any sort of pre-thought or predetermined future but hope for the not-yet and (almost) unimaginable. It is hope for creative newness. As Guattari writes in Chaosmosis, this newness relates to an “important ethical choice” regarding how we conceive of who we are and what we are capable of. “[E]ither we objectify, reify, ‘scientifise’… or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimension of its processual creativity”.

When it comes to fiction, then, I am arguing that the anxiety that provoked the writing of Juice is incited by, not detached from, capitalism and power, and no less “dangerous” than what Winton describes as apathy. That Juice’s representation of climate destruction is reactionary and does not exceed or overwrite its masculism, paternalism and understatement of race. That “fixing” the climate crisis without attending to its correlated racism, sexism and violence is both improbable and concessionary. That Juice is not about hope but anxiety. And that anxiety is continuously exacerbated and exploited by power for the movement of the economy and the deployment of State-operated violence.

In an essay about the writing of Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright mentions “the responsibility of holding the future of all times continuously”. This future holds with it the potentials for different ways of being and living with one another, collective rather than coded by the nuclear family, where subjectivity is emergent rather than essentialised to the human, moral, individual soul. As Guattari reminds us:

We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming… without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society.

This “new art” will not be an anxious one.