Extra! Extra! Announcing Exo – a novel of murder and the end of the world

Exo - a novel by me, published by Diversion Books. Cover by Michel Vrana.

I am really pleased to be able to say that Diversion Books in the USA have announced that in November they will be publishing my first novel – Exo.

Exo is set on a far-future Earth that has largely been abandoned by the human race. The reason for our exodus is the Caul – a deadly liquid entity that has replaced the oceans and which almost no life can resist entering. No one knows why. When 80-year-old Mae, one of Earth’s few remaining inhabitants eking out a life along the Caul’s shores, finds a lost child and her murdered scientist father, she vows to protect the child and uncover the killer. But this will draw her into a conspiracy involving the Caul’s true nature, the future of the Earth and humanity itself . . .

The inspiration for Exo was a visit to Dungeness, on the south-east coast of England in 2004. This almost desert-like, pebble-beached landscape is home to a few beach-launched fishing boats, some hutlike wooden houses, a lighthouse or two, and (at the time) a functioning nuclear power station. The beautiful bleakness, the booming of the tumbling waves, and the few inhabitants scraping a living triggered an outpouring of speculation. This, I imagined, could be the future. The rusting fishing boats became dead rockets. The huts became shacks. The inhabitants became denizens of a lost world. The power station became a research facility. A lighthouse became a temple. And the shore – always a persistent borderland between sea and land, death and life – was a deadly, incomprehensible entity into which the unwary would vanish never to return.

I’ve been writing Exo on and off since then, throwing in my interest in topology – strange and beautiful multi-dimensional mathematical structures that thinking about makes your head hurt but which feel gloriously and weirdly apposite for a science fantasy murder mystery.

Diversion are describing the book as follows:

A debut sci-fi mystery set on an abandoned future Earth, featuring a twisty conspiracy straight out of a John le Carré novel, a group of larger-than-life characters who’d be at home in the work of John Scalzi, and a deeply weird and dangerous hyperdimensional entity to haunt the dreams of any reader of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Humanity is dying. Banished from the Earth, our descendants eke out lives in orbital habitats and moon colonies – and look with longing on our former home.

But the Earth is deadly. Over hundreds of years, its oceans have transformed into an annihilating liquid entity – the Caul. Every living creature approaching its shores is irresistibly compelled to enter . . . and is never seen again.

Scientists, some of the few inhabitants left, work in facilities seeking to understand and stop the Caul. And scavenging the shores are the penitents – those who resist its siren lure.

Among them is penitent Mae Jameson, an octogenarian former Service agent who arrived on Earth thirty years ago to find her lover. When she encounters Siofra, a mute girl, wandering alone by the shore and returns her home, they discover the girl’s father, rogue scientist Carl Magellan, hanging from a noose. He's been murdered. Unwilling to leave the matter in the hands of the facility Carl abandoned years ago, Mae takes Carl’s journals – which detail his obsession with the Caul and its mysteries – and sets about investigating.

In this page-turning, dual-timeline novel, both Mae and Carl's quests for the truth put them at the center of a dangerous conspiracy. Someone believes they can use the secret of the Caul to shape humanity's future, and they aren't afraid to kill to keep control of it.

Exo will out on November 18th and I will be posting some more about it over the coming months. Pre-order links are available here.