I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a brutalist fever dream dressed in concrete and ennui. It’s a story that doesn’t so much depict a descent into chaos as suggest that chaos is the natural state, politely waiting in the wings until the lift stops working and someone pees in the pool.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This isn’t horror in the Stephen King sense—there’s no room 1408 here, no haunted sheets or malevolent chandeliers. The building isn’t animated; it’s engineered. But like all great systems, it doesn’t need a soul to kill you. The real haunting, as ever, is society itself. Ballard simply does away with the need for ghosts and lets architecture and aspiration do the dirty work.
Compared to Crash—where characters make love to car crashes and each other with equal mechanical indifference—High-Rise has something resembling a cast. I say “resembling” because these aren’t people so much as archetypes on a descent escalator. There’s Laing, a kind of blank-eyed anthropologist; Wilder, who mistakes brute force for authenticity; and Royal, the man literally living in a penthouse and metaphorically in a delusion.
Do I care about them? Not in the slightest. But that might be Ballard’s point. Their motivations are as shallow as a puddle in the car park after the water’s been shut off. Much of the action feels contrived, like a staged rehearsal for an apocalypse that already happened.
And yet—isn’t that precisely what society is? A tepid soup of extrinsic motivators dressed up in motivational posters and mission statements. Nobody in the high-rise acts out of depth or conviction. They act because someone else did it first, because no one told them not to, or because the lift only goes so far down and what else is there to do?
If Crash explored the eroticism of the machine, High-Rise explores the nihilism of comfort. Ballard’s thesis seems to be that civilisation is little more than a thin laminate over our baser instincts—and once it peels, there’s nothing underneath but turf wars and brand loyalty to floor numbers.
The modern reader might recognise the high-rise in everything from gated communities to Meta’s metaverse: sanitised, stratified, severed from consequence. A self-cleaning coffin of convenience.
And, as in the United States today, it all comes heavily medicated and prettily lit—with lipstick, meet pig.
Chapter 10 of Propensity is a memorandum—fashioned in the style of a… wait for it… memorandum.
It doesn’t advance the plot much. That’s not its job. Like a dead-end corridor in a brutalist government building, it exists for atmosphere. Aesthetic artefact. Light foreshadowing. Bureaucratic texture. You know the type.
The memo comes from a psychologist involved in the Propensity experiment—writing to the study’s director about unexpected side effects. What they describe isn’t quite failure. It’s something stranger: drift, persistence, compulsive symbolism, the return of narrative despite modulation.
A precursor. A warning. And a throwback to a time when language still tried to make sense of things.
This chapter is one of several experimental inserts throughout the novel. I’ll be showcasing each of them here—in principle, if not in full.
Ever wondered why my characters are displaced, disillusioned, or linguistically marooned? Why my fiction leans philosophical, post-structural, and just a touch anti-humanist?
In this short video, I explain the underlying motivations behind my stories—from Heidegger’s Geworfenheit to Galen Strawson’s Causa Sui, with detours through identity, agency, and the lies we call language.
This isn’t about world-building. It’s about world-dismantling.
Let’s get one thing straight: not all feedback is good feedback. In fact, a depressingly large proportion of it is the literary equivalent of asking a vegan to review your steakhouse. Technically they read the menu, but were they ever really your audience?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
We live in a culture that treats opinion like currency. Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s desperate to spend it. And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of beta reading—a supposedly sacred process in which brave authors hand over their embryonic manuscripts to friends, lovers, ex-wives, and total strangers in the desperate hope someone will “get it.” Most don’t.
Know Thy Manuscript (Before It’s Murdered by Committee)
Before you even think about soliciting feedback, ask yourself: do you actually know what your manuscript is? Is it a quiet literary allegory disguised as sci-fi? A philosophical middle finger wearing the trench coat of genre fiction? A slow-burn deconstruction of capitalism wrapped in alien gloop?
If you can’t answer that, neither can your beta reader. And you’ll deserve every clueless comment that comes slouching back across your inbox like a drunken tortoise.
Audience Matters. (No, Really.)
Let me put it in culinary terms for the metaphorically impaired: if someone hates seafood, they are not qualified to tell you whether your oysters are overcooked. They might be able to describe their gag reflex in exquisite detail, but that’s not useful culinary feedback—that’s autobiography.
Likewise, if your beta reader consumes nothing but cosy mysteries and thinks House of Leaves was “a bit confusing,” why in the name of Borges are you handing them your experimental novella about time, recursion, and the semiotics of grief?
I Know a Writer. I Know Your Pain.
A personal note, if I may. A close friend is a writer. A good one, in fact. But our ideas are so philosophically incompatible that they could be placed on opposite ends of a Möbius strip. Every time they read my work, they suggest alterations that, while technically well-formed, have the uncanny knack of annihilating the entire point of the piece. When I respond, “That’s a great idea—why don’t you write it?” they get cross.
Because here’s the truth: most beta readers don’t give you feedback on your book. They give you notes on the book they wish you’d written.
Signal vs Noise: Spotting the Useful Reader
There’s a simple test I use to distinguish signal from noise.
Bad beta feedback:
“I didn’t like the main character.” “Why don’t they just call the police?” “This story would be better with a love triangle.”
Good beta feedback:
“The way you structured the timeline echoes the narrator’s fragmentation—was that deliberate?” “I wasn’t confused until Chapter 5, which made the earlier ambiguity retroactively frustrating.” “The tonal shift on page 42 feels earned but abrupt—was that intentional?”
In short: good feedback interrogates execution. Bad feedback critiques intention.
The Beta Reader Interview (Yes, You Need One)
You wouldn’t hire a babysitter without asking if they’ve ever met a child. Why would you let someone babysit your manuscript without screening for genre literacy?
Ask them:
What do you normally read?
What do you hate reading?
Can you name a book you loved that nobody else seemed to?
Have you read [Insert book similar to yours]? Did you like it?
If they look at you blankly or start talking about Colleen Hoover, back away slowly.
The Beta Reader Zoo: Know Your Species
Here are a few common subspecies to watch for:
The Rewriter: Wants to turn your Kafkaesque nightmare into Eat, Pray, Love. Run.
The Literalist: “But how would that actually work in real life?” Mate, it’s a parable. About entropy.
The Cheerleader: “Loved it! Don’t change a thing!” (Translation: I skimmed it during Bake Off.)
The Cynic: Thinks everything is nihilistic, including your dedication page.
The Goldilocks: Rare. Reads the book you actually wrote, not the one they wish you had. Cultivate this one like a bonsai tree.
Curate, Don’t Crowdsource
Beta reading is not a democratic process. You are not running a focus group for toothpaste branding. You are searching for a handful of individuals who understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether you’ve pulled it off—or fallen on your clever, post-structuralist arse.
Better three brilliant readers than thirty who think you should add a dragon in Chapter Two.
Final Thought
Your beta reader is not your editor. They’re not your therapist. And they’re definitely not your mum (unless your mum has an MA in critical theory and a fetish for broken narrative structures).
Choose wisely.
Or don’t – and enjoy reading thirty pages of feedback that begins, “I don’t usually read this sort of thing, but…”
PS: I love how Dall-E totally misfired on the cover image. lol
This isn’t a promotional post. I’ve recently discovered the hidden value of audiobooks—and it has nothing to do with selling them.
Back in 2024, when I released Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, I must have read the manuscript a thousand times. I even recorded an audiobook, using an AI voice from ElevenLabs. At the time, Audible wouldn’t accept AI narration. The rules have since changed. It’s now available—though still not on Audible (and therefore not on Amazon).
I’d hired a few proofreaders and beta readers. They helped. The book improved. And yet, even after all that, I still found typos. Those bastards are insidious.
The real revelation came when I started listening.
Since I’d already created the audiobook, I began proofreading by ear. That’s when it hit me: hearing the story is nothing like reading it. Sentences that looked fine on the page fell flat aloud. So I rewrote passages—not for grammar, but for cadence, clarity, flow.
Then came the second benefit: catching mistakes. Typos. Tense slips. I favour first-person, present-tense, limited point of view—it’s immersive, intimate, synchronised with the protagonist’s thoughts. But sometimes, I slip. Listening helped catch those lapses, especially the subtle ones a skim-reading brain politely ignores.
For Sustenance, the audiobook was an afterthought. I submitted the print files, requested a proof copy, and while I waited, I rendered the audio. When the proof arrived, I listened instead of reading. I found errors. Again. Thanks to that timing, I could fix them before production. Of course, fixing the manuscript meant updating the audiobook. A pain—but worth it.
I hadn’t planned to make an audiobook for Propensity—some of the prose is too stylistic, too internal—but I did anyway, because of what I’d learned from Sustenance. And again, I found too many errors. Maybe I need better proofreaders. Or maybe this is just the fallback system now.
I’ve had Temporal Babel, a novelette, on hold for months. I won’t release it until I do the same: make an audiobook, listen, reconcile with the page.
Lesson learned.
I’ve got several more manuscripts waiting in the wings—some have been loitering there for over a year. Their release has been deprioritised for various reasons, but when they go out, they’ll have audio versions too. Not for the sake of listeners. For me.
Honestly, I should do this for my blog posts as well. But editing on the web is easier. The stakes are lower. Mistakes don’t print themselves in ink.
I’ve recently released a new book, Propensity. In preparation for the audiobook version, I’ve assembled some material for PDF that doesn’t convey well in an audible format – this image, for example, from Chapter 43.
This image depicts a frantic ink sketch of a woman’s face, wide-eyed and stricken, as if caught in the instant her world unravels. Her features are carved from chaos—lines scribbled in anguish, as though the act of drawing itself were a desperate grasp for meaning.
The PDF is available for free on the dedicated Propensity page.
I’ll be posting content on Propensity as well as some of my other recent and upcoming releases presently.
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?”
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.
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.
Ridley Park 