‘There is a certain amount of necessary self-delusion in anyone committing to writing a novel’

Two decades in the making, Exo is the debut novel of Colin Brush, who spent his childhood and teenage years in Jersey. A highly original sci-fi murder-mystery set in the distant future, the novel was inspired in part by the Kent coastline. TOM OGG reports

A PROFESSIONAL “flap copy writer” by trade, with the jacket copy for more than 5,000 books to his name, it is unsurprising that the blurb for Colin Brush’s own debut novel – Exo – immediately catches the attention.
“A debut novel of murder, multidimensions and the end of the world”, it begins, before promising readers “a page-turning, dual-timeline novel” akin to the works of John le Carré, John Scalzi and Kim Stanley Robinson.
And, remarkably, the resultant book lives up to its own hype, with the 352-page paperback – published by Diversion Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster – offering an immaculately written and genuinely gripping story. It is, in the opinion of this science-fiction fan, a must-read for fans of adult-orientated sci-fi.
“My publisher describes Exo as a science-fiction murder-mystery – it’s a blend of these two literary genres,” says Colin, chatting from his home in Hastings earlier this week.
“But Exo is also about how the world ends 1,000 years from now, when humanity has abandoned Earth and our descendants are eking out lives in orbital habitats and moon bases. Why have they abandoned the Earth? Because the oceans have turned into an annihilating hyperdimensional liquid entity that – nearly – all living things are irresistibly attracted towards. A few scientists live in protective concrete bunkers studying this oceanic entity – dubbed ‘the Caul’ – while along its shore a number of ‘penitents’ – those who have illegally come to Earth, mostly for religious reasons – subsist, somehow resisting its lure but also unable to leave the quarantined planet.”
One such penitent is Mae Jameson, an 80-year-old female ex-police officer who unwisely follows her journalist husband to Earth after he leaves her while working on a story.
“She never finds him and spends 30 years wandering the shore, until, one day, she finds a mute young girl, alone,” explains Colin. “Returning the child to her rogue scientist father – Carl Magellan – Mae finds Carl dead in suspicious circumstances.”
The subsequent novel tells of Mae’s reluctant taking in of the child, her investigation into Magellan’s death, and her following the trail left by his journals, which reveal how he has discovered the secret behind the Caul and, more importantly, what it might mean for the future of humanity.
“At the same time, it becomes clear to Mae that someone wants to stop her discovering the truth, and that she must protect the girl at all costs,” says Colin.
“While I think the setting of Exo sounds rather bleak, I hope I’ve written something that is both entertaining and thoughtful about how we live in the world and how we face our fears. I enjoyed writing Mae’s journey from bitter loner to caring protector.
“Having said that, if you’re looking for the latest romance-y sensation, you might want to look elsewhere” he adds, with a laugh.
As is readily apparent, Exo has a fascinating and highly original storyline, and one which begs the question: from where did such ideas first originate? The answer, surprisingly, can be found on the coastline of Kent.
“The setting for Exo sprang fully formed into my mind during my first visit to Dungeness, which is on the Kent coast and not too far from Hastings,” says Colin.
“Dungeness is many things. It is a triangular headland made of shingle. It is a site of special scientific interest. It is home to a decaying on-beach fishing fleet, whose boats, dragged up the beach by winches and bulldozers, resemble beached whales. It has two lighthouses, one old and one new. As a settlement, its buildings range from converted railway carriages to caravans to weatherboard fishing huts to a pub to a terminus station and café for the narrow-gauge railway that runs through it to artist Derek Jarman’s famous Prospect Cottage. There is a decommissioned nuclear power station, all concrete boxes. And, finally, there is the sea itself, on two sides of this triangular foreland, and utterly inescapable, even in the frequent mists.
“Like so many who have visited, I was immediately captivated by Dungeness, particularly by these various elements, many of which seem to exist in direct opposition or tension with one another – for example, its barrenness and industry. It felt like an alien world, but at the same time the very end of this world. It seemed to me like I was looking at a landscape from the future that had already been half-forgotten.
“In my mind, the shingle headland became a vast, endless plain. The beached fishing boats became rusting rockets. One of the lighthouses became an abandoned temple. The fishing huts became the shacks of a few, desperate inhabitants, denizens of a lost, abandoned world. The power station became a bunker where scientists researched what had happened here. And the sea mutated into an incomprehensible, dangerous entity that was a threat to anyone foolish enough to get too close to it.
“I scribbled down some notes about Exo and then continued to add to them for many years.”
For “many years” read “two decades”. To say Exo has been a labour of love for Colin would be an understatement, with the author having worked on perfecting the novel for the best part of 20 years.
“Well, part of the reason Exo took so long to write is that I was writing another novel for most of that time and working with an agent to get it right,” he says. “I’d pick up Exo in the long periods while waiting for his responses, though I kept adding to and revising my ideas throughout this time. And then, around 2018, I became so excited by Exo that I put aside the other book and committed to writing Exo instead. In 2021, my agent accepted me as a client and took the book out to both UK and US publishers. But – other than some bites from small publishers and a nibble from a big US publisher – we didn’t have sufficient interest to make a splash, which is important for a first novel. So we parked it.”
Initially, Exo was to have taken place entirely on an alien planet, until a book editor contacted Colin in 2022 and suggested setting the story on Earth instead.
“My agent wondered if I’d like to have a go at revising it,” he recalls. “This took me a year. I cut out a third of the story – a major thread – and entirely rewrote another third, and then I revised the surviving third.”
As Colin acknowledges, setting Exo on Earth in the future “suddenly gave the book more heft than it had before”.
“This was mid-2023. It wasn’t until January 2025 that we finally sold the book to a small US publisher [Diversion Books].”
How, then, did Colin maintain the momentum – and enthusiasm – over such a long period of time? Most authors, I suspect, would likely have given up after a decade, let alone two decades.
“Around 2003, I’d committed myself to getting up early every morning and writing for an hour-and-a-half,” he replies. “From 2011 onwards, I had an hour and 45-minute commute each way into London, five days a week. I decided I was not going to waste that time. You do the work, you submit and you get the rejections – which, of course, hurt because, once again, your genius has not been recognised. But you look for the positives and get excited by the possibilities contained in the negatives – they liked this, but they didn’t like that, so how can that be improved?
“In my work as a publishing copywriter, I am constantly revising what I write to take in comments from editors, marketers, sales and authors. I try to never take negatives personally and see them as an opportunity to make it better, or at least to make it different. That always excites me. What would the story look like this way?
“That said, if you’d told me it’d take over 20 years before I’d get anything published, I wonder whether I’d have been prepared to keep at it throughout those wilderness years. There is a certain amount of necessary self-delusion in anyone committing to writing a novel – not least the fact that you’re mostly no good at it at the start and it generally takes getting a few failed novels written before you alight on something someone wants to publish.”
A lot of sci-fi – whether novels, short stories, films or otherwise – often relates to real-life events and/or people, sometimes subtly, often not. And Exo, it is safe to say, has likewise been inspired in part by real-world events.
“I think few writers work in isolation and the world around us is always going to leak into whatever we write, even when you’re telling a story set 1,000 years from now,” says Colin.
“Initially, I wanted to write about fear and our responses to fear, especially fear of the alien. The sea seemed the perfect metaphor for this. Having arrived on Jersey as a small child and found myself surrounded by water, I’ve always seen the sea as both a source of wonder as well as a threat. It’s so enormous and singular, and yet we only ever glimpse the top of it. We don’t think about those vast deeps.
“When it came to the final big revision of the book – setting it on Earth – it was thuddingly obvious that my big weird entity, the dangerous oceanic and hyperdimensional Caul, would inescapably be read as relating to climate change. Around the same time, I became aware of the work of Timothy Moreton, who views climate change as a ‘hyperobject’ – an entity distributed so vastly over space and time that we humans cannot fully grasp it or its effects on us. This, I realised, was what my Caul had to be for Exo’s characters: something they couldn’t grasp fully. And, as such, it was ripe for showing our various responses to what we fear: hatred, brutality, selfishness, sacrifice, denial, acceptance.”
Born in Dundee, Scotland, Colin moved to Jersey, aged six, with his parents and sister, and remained in the Island throughout his childhood and teenage years.
“My grandparents on my father’s side had already settled in the Island and my parents were fed up of the Scottish climate. We were living in the Highlands and they wanted to move somewhere warmer and less windy – they got the warmer part at least.”
Colin and his sister attended St George’s Prep School, before Colin moved first to St Christopher’s and then Victoria College.
“My O- and A-level qualifications were enough to send me back to Scotland, where I studied geology at the University of Glasgow,” he says. “But then a visit to the BP offices late in my studies revealed that the most likely job for a geologist was marking up seismograms for a living – think accountancy with wavy lines instead of numbers – and so I chose instead to accompany my Glasgow flatmate down to London. Funnily enough, she was also from Jersey – it’s a small world.”
Having been an avid reader since childhood, Colin set about “bothering” bookshop managers until finally he was offered a job buying and selling new titles, which in turn led to a period working at mail-order book club company BCA (Book Club Associates).
“I then landed a job as a copywriter at Penguin Books in 2000, where I remain to this day, writing the jacket copy for books and coming up with advertising campaigns for authors, among them Jamie Oliver, Marian Keyes, Jojo Moyes and David Mitchell.”
For over a decade, Colin and his partner lived in Hackney in northeast London, before moving to Hastings – specifically St Leonards on the town’s western side – in 2011.
“We’d both grown up by the sea and wanted some wetness on our doorstep,” he laughs. “We have two daughters, both currently in secondary schools, and both of whom enjoy messing about by and on the water.”
Although long since settled in the UK, Colin and his family still regularly visit the Island in which he was raised.
“My father passed away a few years ago, but my mother still lives in Jersey, so we visit for what is usually a busy week in the summer, and try and take in as many beaches as time will allow. My daughters are keen sailors, surfers and snorkellers.
“I used to miss the sea until moving to Hastings, when I got back that sense of a vast, restless entity living close by – don’t let anyone ever tell you the sea is not alive. However, there’s something wonderful about living on a bit of rock surrounded by water. In Hastings, you can stare at the sea but you are aware that behind you is a vast hinterland of, well, land. There is no such consolation – if that is the word – when living on an island. You’re looking at the sea and, while there’s a few miles of land behind you, beyond that is yet more sea. The weather and the sea control access to the Island. My mother still regularly complains of shelves being empty in the supermarkets when the boats have struggled to get in. In a 21st century world where we’re told that everything is always on, and whatever you want is just a click or two away, there’s something grounding in the sense that the elements are beyond our control. When the gods are angry, we mortals cower at their fury. And islanders, as the news regularly reminds, are the first to discover how the environment in which we live is rapidly changing all around us.”
Returning to the subject of Exo, Colin says that the voices of his two main protagonists – penitent Mae and scientist Magellan – were both firmly in place from the earliest drafts of the novel.
“Normally when I write something, it takes me a while to get the voices right, but Mae and Magellan were pretty much there from the get-go. It was as if I’d already met these two characters. They were opposites: an old woman, born an orphan, who refuses to give in to a world that has mistreated her, and a middle-aged man who believes nothing should get in the way of his attempts to understand the world.
“The hardest part – though I found it great fun – was writing about exploring higher dimensions, which is part of my characters’ experience of the entity,” he continues.
“I did a lot of research into topology, the geometry of mathematical transformations, especially in higher-dimensional objects. This hurt my brain. In the end, much of it was cut out for the sake of the poor reader. I tend to find that when the author is having too much fun, it is usually at the expense of the reading experience.”
Asked which authors and writers have proven an inspiration on his work, Colin cites the “often surreal science fantasies” of Michael Moorcock as an early inspiration.
“I discovered many of Moorcock’s books in the bookshops of Jersey as a teenager in the 1980s. I was always drawn to his tendency to throw in a bit of witty dime-store philosophy to his imaginative takes on the sword-and-sorcery genre.
“Philip K Dick’s ability to rip the rug out from beneath the feet of the reader at critical points in his novels has also stayed with me, as he asked what is real, and what does it mean to be human.
“More recently, I would cite authors like Jeff Vandermeer and his ultra-weird eco-novel Annihilation – Alex Garland’s film version is passable, but the book itself is sublime. And Aliya Whiteley and her eyebrow-raising Skyward Inn, a tale which you think is about one thing but, boy oh boy, is it actually about something else?
“Also, Tade Thompson’s bold and disturbing vision in his Rosewater novels have all given me much to think about.”
It is likely that Colin’s novel will likewise provide plenty for people to think about. But – given how much time and work went into finishing his first book – does he have plans for a second? A sequel to Exo perhaps?
“Well, about two years ago my agent told me he loved what I was doing but said he couldn’t sell it because romance and fantasy were all publishers were interested in – which is not entirely true, but not untrue either. So, I ditched the new weird science-fiction murder-mystery I was halfway through writing and decided to pick up an old idea I’d had about a school located on an isolated island and the person running away from it. Yes, islands and the sea. You can take the boy out of Jersey, but it seems you can’t take Jersey out of the boy.
“It has, however, become somewhat transformed in the writing. The author Terry Pratchett once advised: ‘If you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than 100 words helps you focus.’ As a professional flap copy writer, I have, of course, followed his advice.”
Here, then, in what is something of a JEP exclusive, is the flap copy for Colin’s second novel, which – at the time of writing – is titled Castle:
“Enter the winter of the world . . .
“On an island off the mainland stands Castle. Inside its walls, two hundred teenage wards are arranged in files and ranks. Some are gifted. Others are afflicted. Many have committed crimes. All are prisoners. But not one of them can remember their own name.
“Castle’s High Staff instruct wards in the Bead Game. Once a year, the Ministry’s Auditors visit and the wards play the game in a tournament. Those who play especially well – or badly – are taken from Castle by night. Only the Auditors know where, and why.
“Soon, one ward will escape the island. Fleeing over the frozen mainland – pursued by militias, given sanctuary by the desperate – this ward carries Castle’s secret. It has come at a terrible cost.
“But the price Ministry will pay to get it back will ravage the land…”