Max Easton on his new novel Now, Autonomy
Acclaimed Australian author Max Easton reflects on Now, Autonomy (1 Aug 2026), his third novel set in Sydney between the mid-nineties and now, following The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estate. The book expands Easton’s project, unique in Australian fiction, of documenting the dramatically changing modes of contemporary life through the lens of underground scenes and subcultures.
This novel has been built, demolished, reconstructed and sanded back so many times that in sitting down to write this author note, I can barely remember which version made it to print. It reminds me of a time when, after breaking a small bone in my wrist, a surgeon told me: ‘you can’t smash toffee, sticky tape it together and make it taste any good.’ But I would disagree. Anything tastes good if you want it bad enough, and I don’t think I’ve ever written anything with as much desire for finding toffee among the sellotape than I did with Now, Autonomy.
I went through a lot of experiments to get to the heart of what I was looking for with this. I haggled with commercial real estate agents, released anonymously authored punk recordings made with friends, broke into condemned buildings to write among the asbestos fibres and pigeon shit. I’m not sure if that shows on the page, but it feels to me like the most embodied thing I’ve ever worked on. Its characters’ motivations, failures and vain attempts were often very close to my own or the people around me. Whether that’s fiction leading reality or the other way around is unclear to me, but maybe that was the point: to blur the boundaries between the page and the real world, without ever losing grip on the fact that this is still, very much, a novel.
I had two overarching passions that drove the writing of this book. One was the shape of Sydney, my home city that continuously suffers at the whims of developers, technocratic state planners and the interests of the investor class. The other was the shape of my generation, us millennials that bemoan the city and cultural milieu we’ve been handed without realising we’re not providing much more to those who come after us. There’s a cross-generational solidarity to Now, Autonomy, an ode to people who have tried and are trying to make good of a place like Sydney, especially for those who can’t meet the cost of living. It was an exercise in writing to the now from the depths of various archives, and in trying to provide something to a reader who sees little of interest in the glossy displays of the local book shop.
On the note of this being the third book in a trilogy of Sydney novels: none of these need to be read in order, nor as a trio, but it’s interesting to me to see these stories and themes and characters sprawl across the novels and beyond, to journals, zines and guerilla publications for whoever eventually finds them.
With thanks to all who worked on this book and whoever finds time to read it.
