After 40 years and 27 books, Tim Winton says he’s now written “the inevitable book”. “When I started writing, I was literally a youth,” he says. “Then I was a young parent. Now I have six grandchildren. You do get a sense of perspective over that time, watching and anticipating the culture.” And now, “we find ourselves in an unavoidable moment, on a razor’s edge”.

It’s no surprise that the novelist who is also well known for his environmental activism is talking about climate change. What is more surprising is that he’s written a novel that fits into the “cli-fi” genre of adventure in a dystopian future. Juice is a whopping 500-page epic set in north-west Australia about two centuries from now.

Life on a hot unstable planet Earth is a constant struggle. The tropical areas are just about uninhabitable. But after a long period of chaos and mass destruction, things have settled down – a bit. Small groups of people are eking out a precarious living, growing crops, harvesting water, trading and salvaging, using low-tech equipment and spending most of the sizzling year underground.

This is the world Winton envisioned when he decided to write about the nightmare our descendants might face if we don’t do something effective within this decade. He’s talking to me from his home office somewhere on the West Australian coast (he won’t get more specific because he wants to spare his family from intruders – “people can be a bit obsessed and unhinged”.)

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time north of the 23rd parallel and a lot of this dystopian future is already with us,” he says. “We’ve just come through a winter in Western Australia with temperatures in the 40s. I know what 50 degrees feels like, and it’s terrifying.” Having six grandchildren – “one in high school, one in primary school, two toilet-trained and two in bassinets” – means the future can no longer be abstract. “I read the future in their little faces.”

He resisted writing this book for a long time, but he was also building up to it. “We’re at a widely acknowledged inflection point in the decisions we’re making – and perhaps more to the point, not making. We’re in the last decade of real agency in terms of mitigating the very worst effects of climate chaos.” After spending 30 years in his other life as an environmental activist, Winton felt that once he had the knowledge, it was a moral evasion not to use it. “So I thought, if not me, who? If not now, when?”

Juice began life soon after his previous novel, The Shepherd’s Hut, came out in 2018. But at the same time, over three years Winton was writing, producing and starring in a documentary series for ABC TV, Ningaloo Nyinggulu. He and director Peter Rees spent more than 400 days filming at Ningaloo Reef, Exmouth Gulf and Cape Range National Park, which together form one of the last intact wild places on Earth, a home to many species, including some that are endangered.

“It’s not a course of action I’d recommend to any person who wants to keep their sanity,” he says. “We shot in very trying physical conditions. There were pretty damn early starts. I was trying to find hours in the day to keep my novel alive. And psychologically it was very challenging. Here I was, trying to celebrate one of the last wild places in the world. And at the same time I was setting my novel in the very same place, probably two centuries on, when the world has gotten away from us.”

He kept going, driven by “frustration and rage, through the wrecking years of Abbott. Then you had the coal-wielding prime minister. The science and the consensus solidified and became overwhelming. And then there was the denial, the moral idiocy and bastardry of the fossil fuel lobby… How do you make something out of this? How do you do something morally complex that’s not just agitprop or a big vomit of frustration?”

His answer was to focus on creating “something terrible and beautiful”.

On one level, Juice is a tense page-turning action adventure. Winton’s hero, living a Stoic peasant-like existence with his mother, is recruited to a secret army and woken up to the fact that the world is not simply the way it is by chance, but has been made that way by the fossil fuel giants of the distant past. The army vows vengeance on the descendants of these giants and the action scenes could come straight from a video game.

“Sadly the thing that would appeal to gamers is the worst of it,” Winton says. The heroic fighters commit more and more appalling violence, but believe it is all necessary for the greater good. “Obviously, this is not something I’m recommending, but it’s historically inevitable.”

Winton calls this violent insurgency “the fruit of humiliation”. We know, he says, that crimes have been committed against nature and humanity, some in our name and some with our money.

I read the future in their little faces.

Tim Winton on his grandchildren

“In all likelihood there will be no Nuremberg trials for climate chaos. But there’s so much data available to anyone who seeks redress in the future. So it’s conceivable those people who have to live in misery will rise up… You produce a bitterness and a savagery, generation upon generation of trauma that almost always surfaces in malign ways.

“If some peaceable old chap like me can conceive of that, you know that millions of other people can have the same idea.”

Winton has no hesitation in placing the blame on the big fossil-fuel corporations, and his secret soldiers recite their names in a song. Is he worried about being sued? “There’s nothing in the book that’s not been on the public record, there’s hardly any argument about it any more.”

Can a novel change people’s minds, wake people up? “I’ve asked myself that about five times a day for the last seven years,” Winton says. “I think it’s unwise to expect art to have a huge political or cultural impact or influence. And yet, I think it’s folly to dismiss the cultural and political potential of art.”

He cites writers in the 1930s who used their work to challenge fascism and other atrocities: “Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell in his complicated way… If you have a wide enough aperture and a long enough lens you can see that novels have had influence over time.”

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And John Steinbeck described climate change in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, about desperate migrants fleeing the Oklahoma dust bowls. “The older I get, the more respect I have for Steinbeck. I see him as a visionary in his way.”

He won’t say this is his most important book – that’s for others to judge. “But it feels timely. I hope first and foremost it’s a rich reading experience and that it moves people to feel and think. That’s all a novelist can hope for, isn’t it?

“And I’d like the experience of the book to be longer than the reading of the book. I’ve been in this caper long enough to know some books do achieve that.”

Juice by Tim Winton (Penguin, $49.99), is out now.