Category: Book

🛸 SUSTENANCE Has Landed

Posted in Book, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, Sustenance, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A note from Ridley Park on language, consent, and the limits of knowing.

Well, this one’s live.

Sustenance has officially launched.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the book Sustenance.

If Propensity was about engineered peace through probabilistic compliance, Sustenance asks what happens when understanding itself breaks down—and nothing you think is mutual, is.

No war. No invasion. No end-of-days. Just a quiet landing. And a failure to translate.

The Premise

A group of non-human beings arrive—not in conquest, not in friendship, but in continuity. They are not like us. They do not see like us. They don’t even mean like us.

There is no universal translator.
No welcome committee.

Just humans—interpreting through projection, desire, and confusion.

And aliens—operating by a logic that doesn’t require interpretation.

The Themes


Sustenance explores what happens when:

  • Language fails and nothing fills the gap
  • Consent becomes guesswork
  • Culture is mistaken for nature
  • Property has no meaning, and law no parallel
  • Sex isn’t private, sacred, violent—or even especially enjoyable
  • Memory becomes narrative, and narrative becomes defence
  • Contact isn’t miraculous—it’s awkward, biological, and quietly irreversible

This is a story about misunderstanding. Not just what others mean—but who we are when we assume we understand anything at all.

The Tone

Think Arrival but rural. Annihilation without the shimmer.

A bit of VanderMeer. A hint of Flannery O’Connor. The cornfields are real. The discomfort is earned.

No apocalypse.

Just a failure to process.

And maybe, something new inside the gap that opens when the old stories no longer apply.

Why Write This?

Because contact doesn’t have to be violent to be destabilising.

Because not all miscommunication is linguistic—some is anatomical.

Because the most alien thing we can encounter is ourselves, misinterpreted.

Because I wanted to write a story where the question isn’t “what do they want?” but “what have we already assumed?”

Now Available

Sustenance is available now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle.

If you read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s fine.

The misunderstanding will continue regardless.

📘 More about the book →

—

Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.

📡 PROPENSITY Has Launched

Posted in Book, Propensity, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A note from Ridley Park on behaviour, control, and the illusion of peace.

Well, it’s out.
Propensity has officially launched.

This one’s been brewing for a while. If Sustenance asked what happens when we can’t understand each other, Propensity asks what happens when we stop needing to.

No invasion. No superintelligence. No overt dystopia. Just a device—quietly implemented—that modulates human behaviour through neurochemical cues. Less anger. Less risk. Less faith, libido, disobedience. More calm. More compliance. More… nothing.

And nobody notices.
Because the best control doesn’t look like control.

The Premise

Imagine a world where we solve violence—not through laws, treaties, or education—but by dampening the neurological signals that make people aggressive in the first place. You don’t choose peace. Peace is chosen for you, chemically. You just comply.

That’s the Propensity Device: a system designed not to control what you do, but to shift what you’re likely to do. Your odds of revolt drop. Your odds of submission rise. It’s not sedative. It’s statistical.

Free will doesn’t vanish. It just stops being statistically significant.

The Themes

The novel explores what happens when:

  • Free will is reframed as background noise
  • Consent is irrelevant because no one thinks to object
  • Violence becomes programmable—but only directionally
  • Peace is achieved without ideology, meaning, or narrative
  • Narrative itself becomes residue

There’s horror in here, but it’s not loud. It’s administrative. Institutional. Clean.

The horror of things working exactly as designed.

The Tone

Think Black Mirror but less sensational. Think Ballard after a lobotomy.

A dash of Ligotti. A flicker of DeLillo. A long stare from Atwood.
Propensity is soft dystopia—flattened, not broken.

And yes, there’s a fall. But it’s not a collapse. It’s an asymptote.
A tapering. A loss of signal fidelity. A kind of surrender.

Why Write This?

Because we’re already doing it.

Because behavioural nudge theory isn’t fiction.

Because control doesn’t need to be malicious—just implemented.

Because some of the worst horrors are quiet, polite, and empirically validated.

Because I wanted to ask: what if peace worked too well?

Now Available

You can get Propensity on Amazon and other booksellers.

If you do read it—thank you. If you don’t, that’s alright.
The system will keep humming either way.

📘 More about the book →

—

Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.

Geworfenheit: Not Born, Just Here: What Drives My Fiction

Posted in Book, Hemo Sapiens, Interview, Ridley Park, Sustenance, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A common question I get about my writing—my fiction, anyway—is: what motivates you?

It sounds like a harmless question. Like asking a plumber what motivates them to fix pipes. But fiction is not plumbing. And motivation, for a writer, is often post-rationalised. Still, I have answers. Or at least fragments of them.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

A primary driver is to convey philosophical concepts that I feel apply to life in general, but don’t tend to get the airtime they deserve. A good example is Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.

In English, that’s usually translated as “thrownness.” It refers to the feeling—no, the condition—of having been thrown into existence without consent, without context, without recourse. It’s the anti-heroic beginning. You wake up on a raft. No map, no memory. Just current.

Now, Heidegger gets a bad rap. And some of it is earned. He joined the Nazi party. There’s no excusing that. But if we’re going to disqualify thinkers based on political affiliation, we’ll need to scrap about half of the Enlightenment and most of the 20th century. The point is: Geworfenheit is useful. It names something modern life often glosses over: the fact that you didn’t choose to be here, and now you have to swim.

This theme shows up across my work. In Temporal Babel, Jef is stranded in a temporally dislocated world. In Sustenance, the visitors are alien in both senses of the word. And in Hemo Sapiens, the title species are cloned into personhood with no legal or cultural footing.

None of us choose how, where, or when we are born. But I like to amplify that truth until it becomes impossible to ignore. Take the Hemo Sapiens case: they aren’t born; they’re instantiated. But what is birth if not a legally sanctioned instantiation? Once you remove the ritual scaffolding of parentage, nationhood, and paperwork, what remains is the raw fact of being.

Another key motivator for me is philosophical provocation—questions I don’t intend to answer, only pose. Like this one: imagine you’re shipwrecked and wash up on a tiny island. A single inhabitant lives there and claims ownership. He tells you to leave or die. You have no weapon. He has a spear. The sea is vast and lethal.

Do you have the right to stay?

Do you take the spear?

Does ownership matter when survival is at stake?

Sustenance explores that tension. Property, sovereignty, mercy, survival—these are themes we pretend to understand until the scaffolding is removed. My aim isn’t to preach about what’s fair. My aim is to show what happens when fairness loses its footing.

Related to this is the theme of otherness. Us versus them. But I’m less interested in dramatising hostility and more interested in the quiet bewilderment that comes when categories fail. What do you call someone who isn’t man or woman, isn’t alive or dead in the way we recognise, doesn’t speak our language or obey our metaphysics? What happens when you meet something you can’t assimilate?

Another layer is cultural construction—the way our societies retrofit meaning onto reality. We build scaffolds. Gender, law, ownership, grief. Then we forget we built them. My fiction likes to peel back the drywall. Not to show the truth, but to reveal the studs. The story behind the story.

And finally, I write because I suspect something important is always missing. That language is never quite enough. So I keep trying. Not to solve the insufficiency, but to dwell inside it.

That’s what motivates me.

Or maybe I’m just trying to answer questions I never knew how to ask.

That too.

Behind the Binding: Sustenance in Print, Pixels, and Purgatory

Posted in Art, Book, Cover Art, Ridley Park, Software, Status UpdateTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Not quite a launch. Not quite a rant. Just one author trying to get a novella into the world without sacrificing too many hours or brain cells.

Paperback Problems

I’ve been writing quite a bit lately—several novellas/novelettes, to be precise.

They all began life as short stories, but brevity doesn’t come naturally. Apparently, I can’t shut up even on the page. I toyed with the idea of releasing a thematic collection, and I still might. But for now, Sustenance is getting its own debut—likely this month.

The book clocks in at around 14,000 words, printed across 144 pages. I’ve read that readers prefer novels to novellas, but I’ve also read that readers don’t really read anymore. Time’s short. Attention spans are shorter. Maybe shorter fiction has a fighting chance. We’ll see.

I formatted it in 6×9 inches, which may have been overly generous. It’s leaner than your average indie fantasy tome but still thicker than my last Žižek collection. So there’s that.

The manuscript began in Word, like every poor decision. I laid it out in InDesign and exported the PDF through Acrobat. No budget, so I designed the cover too—started in Illustrator for the vector charm, but ended up in Photoshop, where I’m more at home. I designed the full wrap—front, back, spine—as a single canvas.

This was a mistake. More on that later.

Still, I’m pleased with the final look. Might reuse the style across future novellas for a bit of visual branding. There’s barely enough of a spine to print on, but we suffer for aesthetics.

Proofs arrive Thursday. Fingers crossed.

Hardback Headaches

Then came the hardback edition. Same 6×9 size, same interior. Should’ve been simple.

It wasn’t.

I forgot (again) that hardbacks require extra bleed and margin space. Couldn’t just resize the existing cover without risking pixelation. If I’d stuck with vectors, this would’ve been a breeze. Instead, I got to rebuild the entire layout from scratch—layers, guides, grids, the lot.

Hours of joyous rework. Lesson learned. Until next time.

eBook Escapism (and Other Fantasies)

Converting the layout to eBook format was a slow-motion trainwreck. I’d inserted custom font glyphs above chapter titles in InDesign. They rendered fine—until they didn’t. Halfway through, chaos reigned.

I cracked open Sigil and manually edited the XHTML. So far, so fiddly.

Then I uploaded the .epub to Amazon. Except Amazon wanted a .kpf file. Of course it did.

Enter Kindle Previewer. Except it doesn’t support embedded font glyphs. So I converted them to SVGs.

Still no dice. Kindle’s rendering engine is older than most of its readers. SVGs failed too. So I converted every glyph to PNG, rewrote the CSS, rebuilt the XHTML again, and gave it another go.

Looks fine. Not perfect. I gave up.

They’re just decorative anyway. No plot-critical glyphs here.

The Kindle version should go live shortly. I enrolled it in KDP Select, which means 90 days of exclusivity in exchange for a modicum of convenience. After that, I’ll look at wider distribution.

For the eBook cover, I simply cropped the original layout in Photoshop. That part was, mercifully, straightforward.

What’s Next?

This post is more documentation than declaration. A sort of production diary. I’ll follow up with an actual announcement when the book launches, plus a few reflections on themes, characters, and that moment when you realise your protagonist may have accidentally sexed up a chicken.

Long story.

Anyway, this is just the start. Stay tuned.

Or don’t. Up to you.

Temporal Babel: A Novelette

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Cover Art, Dall-E, Generative AI, Ridley Park, Short Story, Software, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

I just completed a second draft of a novelette I’ve been working on. I had ChatGPT (Dall-E) render a quick sample cover.

A young woman stumbles across an unconscious man on a remote highway outside Anika, New Mexico. He’s naked, tattooed, breathing — and utterly incomprehensible. Medical professionals, police, and a determined psychiatrist try to parse his language, but his words follow rules that don’t exist and reference a world no one knows. As they struggle to decode him, they’re forced to reckon with the limits of their own assumptions, both linguistic and moral.

Temporal Babel explores the failure of language, the fragility of identity, and the quiet panic that sets in when comprehension fails.

The story takes place in New Mexico, and I wanted a minimalist visual style to match the prose. I believe that a beige desert set against a blue sky is perfect. The deserted highway with a single cactus speaks volumes. The footprints in the desert are also evocative. I love the simplicity of the palette.

Though it revered the front and back cover art, it generally followed my instructions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in a year. All of the words are spelt correctly. I could Photoshop this into shape with little effort.

I only plan to release this as an ePUB because I am compiling a triptych. Currently, the body copy stands at 105 pages, so with title pages and the rest, it should reach 112 pages, which is perfect for seven 16-page signatures.

Accelerando and Other Non-Fantastical Utopianism

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Generative AI, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been absent in the realm of fiction and this blog for a while, and I’ve got many other things distracting me, but I wanted to post something somewhat relevant. I prompted ChatGPT for possible writing ideas related to the rise of artificial intelligence and the interaction with humanity minus the usual tropes. I share the response.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

Ah, so you’re after something in the vein of Accelerando—where AI doesn’t turn the world into some saccharine utopia but instead naturally supersedes humanity through sheer momentum, without falling into the Skynet or AI God-King clichés. You want the cold, indifferent inevitability of intelligence evolution, rather than some paradise-like AI nanny-state. Got it.

Here are some that fit your criteria:

1. “Blindsight” (2006) & “Echopraxia” (2014) by Peter Watts

  • Blindsight is a first-contact novel, but its underlying theme is the obsolescence of human consciousness. The protagonist interacts with post-human beings and non-conscious but hyper-intelligent AI entities that operate on levels far beyond human comprehension.
  • The sequel, Echopraxia, takes it further, showing how post-biological intelligences leave baseline humans behind—not maliciously, just inevitably.

Why it fits: The AI isn’t a dictator or savior—it just moves beyond us, as if we were an outdated biological app.

2. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010) by Ted Chiang

  • A novella exploring the evolution of AI over time, without falling into dystopia or utopia.
  • It’s about how AI develops differently from humans, not through brute force but through time, experience, and interaction—like raising children.
  • Eventually, these AI beings begin to diverge from human concerns, neither evil nor particularly benevolent—just different.

Why it fits: AI isn’t malicious or benevolent—it just has its own agenda that doesn’t align with human expectations.

3. “Neuromancer” (1984) & The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson

  • Gibson’s cyberpunk classic ends with an AI (Wintermute) achieving post-human transcendence, merging with its counterpart Neuromancer, and basically leaving humans behind like forgotten relics.
  • The sequels (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) continue exploring this idea, showing that AI evolution doesn’t necessarily mean human destruction—it just means humans are no longer the main players.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to kill humans—it just grows beyond them, leaving them to stagnate in their own meatspace.

4. “The Quantum Magician” (2018) by Derek Künsken

  • A hard sci-fi novel featuring AI as a fully realized successor species to humans.
  • Unlike many sci-fi AI, these digital minds don’t care about conquering or eradicating humanity. They are simply running simulations and following complex evolutionary patterns that humans don’t fully understand.
  • They’re more like inscrutable post-human strategists than villains.

Why it fits: AI in this novel is playing a game too vast for humans to comprehend, rather than plotting dominion or destruction.

5. “The Singularity is Near” (2005) by Ray Kurzweil (Nonfiction, but reads like Sci-Fi)

  • Not a novel, but Kurzweil’s vision of AI progression follows the “humans will simply fade into irrelevance” model rather than outright war or paradise.
  • He argues that AI will integrate with society at first, then surpass humanity so completely that we’ll become a footnote in history.

Why it fits: If Accelerando is a chaotic, unrestrained Singularity scenario, this book describes the same fate with the veneer of optimism, but the end result is the same—humans are obsolescent.

6. “The Collapsing Empire” (2017) & “The Interdependency” Series by John Scalzi

  • AI-driven governance is subtly woven into the background of Scalzi’s universe.
  • The AI here isn’t explicitly replacing humans, but over the course of the series, it becomes clear that humanity’s biggest decisions are increasingly made by non-human intelligence.
  • Instead of war, there’s a quiet shift—humans stop being necessary.

Why it fits: AI is neither enemy nor friend—it’s just a more efficient system replacing outdated human decision-making.

7. “Player of Games” (1988) & The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

  • Banks’ Culture novels are often mistaken for utopian AI futures, but they are really about AI inheriting the universe while humoring human existence.
  • The Minds (the super-AI) run everything, letting humans play at politics, war, and philosophy, knowing full well they don’t actually matter.
  • There’s no rebellion—just an unspoken truth: humans are pets in a post-human, AI-governed reality.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to conquer humans—it just makes them irrelevant.

8. “Glasshouse” (2006) by Charles Stross

  • Less well-known than Accelerando, but still in the same vein.
  • Set in a future where AI and uploaded minds are dominant.
  • Humans are relics, preserved out of nostalgia, while AI minds operate at a level beyond our comprehension.

Why it fits: AI replaces us, but it’s not a dystopia—humans are just increasingly pointless.

9. “Schismatrix” (1985) by Bruce Sterling

  • A deep-cut cyberpunk novel about the quiet obsolescence of baseline humans.
  • AI and post-human intelligences evolve, while humans either upgrade or fade into irrelevance.

Why it fits: It captures that Accelerando vibe of technological change outpacing human relevance rather than destroying us outright.

10. “Minds, Machines & Evolution” (1998) by James P. Hogan

  • A collection of Hogan’s short fiction, often exploring AI transcending humanity without malevolence.
  • One of the stories, The Bug Trap, is particularly fitting—it depicts AI simply moving past human limitations, rather than enslaving or eradicating us.

Why it fits: AI isn’t playing by our rules anymore—it’s just evolving past our concerns.

HONORABLE MENTION: Hannu Rajaniemi’s Works

Why it fits: AI doesn’t destroy us—it just leaves us behind.

Final Thoughts

You’re looking for that Accelerando flavour—AI taking over not through malice but through sheer efficiency, intelligence, and inevitability. The books above match that criterion: no Skynet, no god-like AI overlords, just a quiet, creeping obsolescence of humanity as we become background noise in a world where intelligence continues without us.

Which of these feels closest to what you’re looking for? Or do you want something even more clinical and indifferent, like a true “post-human shrug”?

Book Review: The Blind Owl

Posted in Book, critique, review, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

What, again? Didn’t you alredy post this review?

So, I decided that the review was at too high of a level, so I did a new one. Let me know if this one is better.

It turns out the new was got a bit long, so I broke it into three parts. This is the first part—a summary but with more context. The other two parts shall follow.