Is humanity destined to repeat a kind of algorithm that destroys what we love? Reflections on Tim Winton’s novel, Juice, and the fast emerging role of AI
First published by Eremos Magazine, August 2025
(Image: Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey)
If God speaks through acclaimed West Australian author and environmentalist Tim Winton, a self-declared “existential Christian”, then Winton’s latest book, set well into the future, is his most prophetic, certainly his first attempt at dystopian fiction. Juice is a 513-page nightmare, a dream meant to frighten us about extreme climate change. It also teases the reader about the role of AI.
Juice is a reenactment of humanity’s banishment from the Garden of Eden. Innocence is lost, and hard work, harder than anything we are used to, shrinks play. Wildlife is not seen and not heard, only remembered.
Winton conjures up a planet with so little beauty, nothing close to sublime, that it has little room for the Divine. There are few opportunities for transcendence. And yet there are moments of tenderness when the unnamed narrator-protagonist reflects on the nature of love and service. The Jesus story, of a man who extends grace and dies for others, is hinted at by the appearance of artificially intelligent beings known as Sims. They offer more hope than people, challenging the notion that humans are inherently humane.
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At an Adelaide author event, Winton was asked which story had had the biggest impact on him growing up. I am paraphrasing what I heard him say:
It’s a story my grandmother told me about herself as a girl. She lived on a farm. She was caught in a grass fire and badly burned. Her father was killed. Doctors pulled out his intestines and used them to cover her burns. I didn't understand the story as a little boy. As I got older, I came to understand it. He died so she could live. My grandmother told that story as a kind of an emblem. It had a big effect on me.
In Juice, there are no quick salves, no metaphorical intestines. The collapse of order – the beginnings of which we seem to be experiencing right now – becomes ‘The Terror’, a period the characters register in the distant past.
The excesses of the industrial and capitalist age have pushed the Earth across a threshold. Winters are hot and summers are lethal, lasting more than six months. The only thing to do is spend those months underground. People risk going mad. Cannabis or ‘choof’ keeps people from total mental oblivion.
Our narrator’s time is marked by a reestablished order and relative stability under ‘associations’, bodies held together by mutual dependency and by remembering and retelling the ‘The Sagas’, parables of pain and endurance centred around life since The Terror.
The narrator tells his story to a grumpy armed bowman in the hope he won’t kill him.
We learn about the narrator’s early life when he and his widowed mother eked out a frugal living as small plot farmers, hardy and practical ‘homesteaders’, through local foraging and trading. His whole life was shaped and governed by strict patterns and mores in relative peace.
He did not know why life had the ebb and flow it did until his late adolescence when he was inducted into a highly secretive paramilitary group called The Service and told how fossil fuel companies wantonly grew their profits, knowing the damage their products would do. It ruptures his sense of self but hooks him. He leaves his mother and later, his wife Sun and daughter, for dangerous and gruelling episodes to hunt down and exterminate the descendants of the people who ran Rio, Chevron, Shell, BP, Woodside and Santos.
Hundreds of pages later, he recognises the folly of his revenge attacks. He replaced relative peace with intoxicating comradery. His obsession costs him his marriage and any semblance of joy in family life.
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In between reading chapters of Juice, I swam the beaches of southwest Adelaide, taking in underwater cameos of mating blue crabs, and shy speckled fish, darting between areas of shallow seaweed. There were tears inside my joy. Would these creatures be here in a generation's time for my children’s children to see? That Summer, farmers in the Adelaide Hills were planning to truck in water. It hadn’t rained in months.
By Autumn, it still hadn’t rained. A toxic microalgae bloom had emerged across Adelaide’s beaches, causing sharks, rays, and other marine life to wash up on the coast, weakened by poison.
That season, candidates campaigned in a federal election, barely mentioning climate change.
Liberal Opposition leader Peter Dutton used a version of his slogan from the bitter 2023 referendum on The Voice: If you don’t know, vote no. At the ABC election debate, he refused to say whether Australia was experiencing climate change: "I think the honest answer for most people is that they don't know, and there are scientists who can provide advice.”
The campaign had been delayed by a cyclone.
Catholic-raised Anthony Albanese, having declared the climate wars over in 2022, was hardly quizzed about the fact that Australia’s net emissions had grown since that year. The 2025 campaign was fought against the backdrop of the United States walking back from the Paris Agreement.
Within days of being re-elected and declaring kindness was back, Labor approved a massive fossil fuel development in Western Australia, equivalent to 33 years of Australia’s entire emissions. The North West Shelf was already the largest fossil fuel project in the Southern Hemisphere. Juice is set where a real carbon bomb had been set off.
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As our protagonist is flying over another raid site, a crew member with The Service tells him about the expanse of bare-baked rock below.
This used to be covered in forest, you know. This island. Cloud forest, they called it. Two hundred kinds of birds… The dying face of God.
My mother used to tell me that when Nature dies, God dies along with Her. ... She said the first form of revelation is the natural world. Wild, living nature, coherent, intact, independent and unknowable in its abundance and fecundity - its fertility.
I guess what my mother meant is that without clean, wild, healthy things that can generate and renew themselves, the idea of God is impossible to imagine.
The woman named Awe also tells the protagonist about the legend of Adam and Eve, a story he is vaguely aware of.
There’s an ancient myth. About people in paradise. An orchard in which they were born, where they were safe. With food, they could just pluck from the trees…
There’s this one tree, right? It’s off-limits to the people. There’s power in the fruit.
Yes, knowledge.
And they eat it.
Yes
They were always going to. Eventually. Don’t you think?
Yes… I imagine so….
What’s the point of this story?
Oh, I don’t know if there’s a point, exactly. But it does offer a chance to remind ourselves of what it means to be human. Don’t you think? Before they break their limits, those people are like us, but not quite us. We’re conscious. With knowledge. Curiosity. Imagination. It’s a reminder of the burden that comes with those gifts. And, I guess, the consequences that come from shirking that burden…
You’ve lost me….
I think you know how the story goes after the tree and the garden. And you’ve read some history, seen the docs and pics at Indiction….
All that genius… All that potential. So much of it wasted on bastardry. Lies. Empires. Slavery. That was not inevitable. And it won’t happen again. Why?
Us?
Yes, Volunteer. Because we won’t let it.
Late in the book, after storming the Utah bunker of the clan linked to ExxonMobil, the narrator is badly injured but saved by a united group of Sims, slaves of the enemy. They see him as a guest, not a prisoner. They profess no master. Their programming sets them up with an unshakable impulse to serve. He suffers burns and awakes from what must be a concussion, in a cave where they have placed him to recover.
The next thing I remember is waking in a foetid hollow, stripped to the waist, surrounded by faces and fanning hands. They gave me water to drink. Pressed wet cloths to my chest.
One in the group of Sims has perished.
Eating revived me somewhat. I watched the faces and hands of my saviours, saw how they squatted and huddled together and I thought of what writhing, smouldering form they’d left behind on the sands. They seemed shaken. I was surprised by their common distress. I hadn’t expected these things to experience pain and loss. But their grief was palpable. Truly, if not for their prodigious speed, their resilience, and the slightly disconcerting uniformity to their appearance, you’d have taken them for humans.
Winton’s view is not, by the way, the picture of AI that is emerging in real life, where proprietary AI in the hands of bad-faith actors threaten to do more harm than good, spreading falsehoods, exploiting children, privatising democracy, and providing the tools for surveillance, law enforcement and mass violence.
Artificial intelligence presents a testing ground for key theological questions. If, and it is a BIG if they are programmed to the best of human nature, might they also be imago Dei - made in the image of what is called ‘God’? Winton teases philosophers, especially those in the new areas of computational theology and cybernetics, with ideas about the nature of machine intelligence and care. Might they replicate human love, even if manufactured to serve at all costs? At this point, I doubt it.
The grace extended by the Sims invites the protagonist to reflect on humanity. He recognises their decency. They sought nothing in return, only honourable treatment. Their grace welcomes him to come back to something of his essence - his true and gentle self.
He leaves The Service and his beloved peninsula. He goes on the road. He discovers companionship with a female Sim he encounters, who is found caring for a stranded human child. That love is short-lived. The Sim is sexually assaulted and killed by a human male gang. Schooled in revenge, the protagonist guns down the offenders in a rage that momentarily blinds him to the brutality of his own acts over many years. Still, he knows that grief and anger can only take him so far.
Are we destined, I wondered, after the destruction of habitats and acts of genocide, to repeat a kind of algorithm that destroys what we love? Have we lost sight of our humanity, and settled for programmed life, blind to the earth’s needs?
Our protagonist makes peace with himself by deciding to care for the abandoned kid, a stranger to him but a child, mute by untold traumas, that he recognises in himself. He pays a debt by making a redemptive promise in honour of the dead female Sim and other saving Sims.
He tells the disenchanted bowman threatening him with death:
I know who I am. And I know how the world is. I haven’t caved in comrade. I still know what’s right.
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Climate change is a deep-time pattern. Earth-bound species have crumpled and died remarkably often, and the more complex they have become, the more quickly they appear to have gone extinct. It is perhaps one reason why so much of life, from lichen to birds, isn't that ambitious. What’s new this time is that humans are helping to extinguish humans and the ecosystems from which they come and rely.
Winton wrote Juice out of love and rage, ambitious for action to save an interconnected planet. It’s a demanding but generative contribution. It seems too long a book, but the monotony of violence and hardship, chapter after chapter, may well be a literary device (Then again, Winton, as a famous novelist, may not have had an editor willing to grapple with the word length).
We are faced with how we might respond, what ‘juice’ - more than energy but faith in life and each other - might we need to persevere as survivors of an unravelling world, asking what our humanness brings.
The novel changes the tone of one’s mind. It pressed me to consider the nature of the unity of spiritual or religious faith, which for me is combining knowledge with action. It provoked me to ask, again, ‘What is mine to do?’
I like that the book resists a false sense of closure. But one is left wondering if Winton, a pacifist, has lost faith in humanity, and if so, does he place it in AI, which is not born, but made by humanity. In interviews, Winton has expressed despair about what he calls ‘the great silence” about climate change, appearing cynical and disillusioned about people, certainly the systems they create.
An author’s biography can be telling. I was prompted to dip again into Winton’s memoir The Boy Behind the Curtain for clues.
At age just eight, out for a friend’s birthday party, Winton and his mates went into the wrong cinema and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. It had a profound effect. The message of that seminal 1968 film was that intelligent life will go on, but the human race will be subsumed.
Two, Winton’s father was a traffic cop. Over time, he struggled to disguise his endless disappointment in people (The Winton family also owned a rifle, single shot .22 Lithgow, which the young Tim Winton handled soberly, with awe and a sneaky compulsion). Stories of violence and temptations around violence, and the risk of accidents, circled him as a young man.
Finally, I was reminded of Winton’s love of surfing. It unlocked the artist in him. Board and body surfing are quasi-spiritual. Whatever the ride, there are perils. Which returns us to climate change. It is like a giant rip. You have little purchase and control, caught up in it.