Author
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.
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.
A note from Ridley Park on language, consent, and the limits of knowing.
Well, this one’s live.
Sustenance has officially launched.
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.
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.
Sustenance explores what happens when:
This is a story about misunderstanding. Not just what others mean—but who we are when we assume we understand anything at all.
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.
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?”
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.
—
Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.
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.
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 novel explores what happens when:
There’s horror in here, but it’s not loud. It’s administrative. Institutional. Clean.
The horror of things working exactly as designed.
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.
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?
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.
—
Ridley Park
Possibly a person. Possibly a place. Possibly both.
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.
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.
You’ll hear it a thousand times in creative writing circles, often whispered with the reverence of sacred doctrine: character is king. Give your protagonist an arc, they say. Make them grow. Show them change. Rinse. Resolve. Repeat.
Forgive me, but I’m not here for that workshop claptrap.
“I don’t build arcs. I drop people into a world and let them drown, float, or disappear.”
My writing isn’t character-driven in the conventional sense. I don’t sculpt protagonists to take heroic journeys or undergo epiphanic transformations. I’m not interested in plumbing the depths of their souls or bandaging their inner wounds with moral insight. My primary concern is the world—the philosophical or sociological structure—through which characters drift, orbit, or plummet. Sometimes they leave a mark. Often, they don’t.
Because real life isn’t narrative. It doesn’t arc. It drifts. And most of us don’t develop. We adapt. We cope. We muddle through.
“From a narrative perspective, we start somewhere in the middle and end somewhere else in the middle.”
Resolution, in most stories, is a parlour trick—narrative taxidermy dressed as transcendence. In reality, most encounters don’t resolve. They expire. People come and go. You cross paths with strangers who change your life—or don’t—and then vanish back into the abyss of statistical anonymity.
One of my recent manuscripts begins with a woman named Sena discovering a body by the roadside. She reports it, the authorities arrive, and the narrative follows them—until it doesn’t. It dissipates. No tidy resolution, no tight bow. Just the unfurling tedium of systemic procedure and human irrelevance. It’s not a mystery story. It’s a story with mystery in it. Big difference.
We like to pretend we’re central to our own story, each of us a protagonist in a universe scripted for personal development. But sometimes, we’re not even side characters. Sometimes, we’re scenery. Camus’ Meursault had it right: the sun matters more than your feelings, and death shows up whether you’ve had your arc or not.
“Psychologically, we like to assume we have agency. That’s why we tell stories with resolution—because it flatters us to imagine things make sense.”
Yes, some readers crave grandiosity—heroes, villains, the Great Man Theory dressed in narrative drag. Napoleon didn’t just wage war; he “struggled with destiny.” Stalin wasn’t just a paranoid bureaucrat; he was “a force of history.” These are characters written by history with the same myth-making brush that writes fiction. Convenient, cathartic, utterly inaccurate.
But I don’t write demigods. I write witnesses, floaters, participants without insight. They’re often not even granted the courtesy of closure. They move through a world that refuses to acknowledge their significance. And why should it? The cosmos doesn’t care if your backstory is tragic or if your girlfriend left you on page forty-two.
Sometimes the character who seems central is merely catalytic. Other times, they’re inert—filler between philosophies. If someone changes, maybe it’s society, not them. Maybe the reader. Or maybe no one.
So no, I don’t build arcs. I don’t force characters to evolve like Pokémon just because Act III demands it. I drop them into a world and watch what happens—often, nothing. Because that, more than any tidy redemption tale, is how life actually works.
“In my stories, characters are pawns—how I envisage others: merely players, perhaps trying to make sense of the world they’ve been thrown into.”
That’s the work. Not myth-making. Not therapy. Observation. Dissection. Not a ladder to transcendence but a mirror, tilted just so.
Welcome to Ridley Park. Watch your footing. There are no arcs—only echoes.
Another cross-post. Gotta go…
First time. Let’s see how this works.
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.
I employ AI editors for copyediting and alpha-reading. They are useful but have limitations.
Some of my writing is ordinary – Acts I, II, and III; Beginning, Middle, and End. This is AI’s sweet spot: assess a piece and compare it to a million similar pieces, sharing plot structures, story and character arcs, heroes’ journeys, and saving cats.
Other stories are experimental. They don’t follow the Western tradition of tidy storylines and neat little bows, evey aspect strongly telegraphed, so as not to lose any readers along the journey.
Mary approaches a doorway. Mary opens the door. She walks through the doorway — the doorway she had approached.
Obviously, this is silly and exaggerated, but the point remains. AI presumes that readers need to be spoonfed, especially American audiences. (No offence.)
But life doesn’t work like this. We often witness events where we have no idea what happens after we experience them. We pass strangers on the street, not knowing anything about their past or future. We overhear something interesting, never to get a resolution. We get passed by for a promotion but never know the reason why.
In science, there are lots of dead ends. Do we want to know the answers? Yes. Is one likely? Maybe; maybe not. Will we make up answers just to satisfy our need for closure? It happens all the time.
In writing, we seem to not accept these loose ends. How many times have you read a review or critique where the complaint is, “What happened to this character?” or “Why didn’t Harry Potter use his invisibility cloak more than once despite it being an obvious solution to many prior and future challenges he faced?”
Sure. I agree that it feels like a plot hole, but the author doesn’t have to tell you that Harry lost it in a poker match, it got lost in the wash, or Ron snatched it.
I’m finishing a story, and various AIs provide similar commentary. Even more humorous are the times it can’t follow a thread, but when a human reviewer reads it, they have no difficulty. In the end, there may be unanswered questions. Some of these leave the universe open for further exploration, but not all questions have answers. AI has difficulty grasping this perspective.
The skies darkened over the Coop of Justice. Inside, Rhoticity Chicken—a rooster of unparalleled enunciation—perched on his golden roost, adjusting his crimson cape. His mission was simple: to defend the final R in English against the insidious forces of vowel decay.
Across the barnyard, his greatest nemesis, Non-Rhotic Chicken, cackled from atop his weathered soapbox. “Togethah, my feathah’d comrades,” he declared, wings outstretched, “we shall ERASE the intrusive ‘R’ from this land. Wintah, summah, law and ordah—it shall all flow smoothly once more!”
A murmur rippled through the coop. Some hens clucked nervously. Others nodded, spellbound by his seamless vowel transitions.
But then, a mighty R echoed through the barn like thunder.
“NEVER!”
Rhoticity Chicken flapped into the air, his chest puffed out with impeccable articulation. “You shall NOT take the final ‘R’! I have defended it from the creeping shadows of elision for YEARS, and I shall not fail now!”
From the shadows emerged The Trilled Chick Henchmen, a gang of feathered mercenaries trained in rolled Rs. They trilled menacingly, their Spanish and Italian inflections rattling the walls of the barn.
“Señor Rhoticity, your time is up,” rasped El Gallito, the leader of the henchmen. “Your crude American Rs will be smoothed away like an old dialect in the sands of time. Trill, my hermanos!”
They rolled their Rs in unison, a sinister wave of phonetic force blasting toward Rhoticity Chicken. He staggered, his own hard R wavering against the onslaught of linguistic variation.
But he clenched his beak and stood firm.
“No,” he declared, eyes blazing. “You can roll your Rs, you can drop them, but you will NEVER take away my right… to pronounce… HARD R’s!”
With a mighty CROW, he unleashed his ultimate attack:
THE RHOTIC RESONANCE
A shockwave of perfectly articulated, non-trilled Rs blasted through the barn. It swept across the land, restoring all lost R’s to their rightful places.
Non-Rhotic Chicken gasped as his vowels stiffened. “No—NOOOO! My beautiful syllabic flow—GONE!” He clutched his throat as a long-forgotten ‘R’ slipped back into his speech.
“I… I… can’t… say cah anymore… I… I just said… car.”
The barn fell silent.
Defeated, Non-Rhotic Chicken collapsed into a pile of feathers, mumbling in fully articulated rhoticity.
The Trilled Chick Henchmen scattered, their rolling Rs faltering into incoherent babbling.
Rhoticity Chicken stood victorious. He fluffed his cape, took a dignified breath, and proclaimed:
“Justice. Honor. Pronunciation.”
And with that, he flew into the night, ready to defend hard R’s wherever they were threatened.
THE END…?
Ridley Park 