Sustenance

A speculative novella by Ridley Park

“It’s not a story about aliens. It’s a story about the limits of understanding—ours.”

Overview

An illustration featuring the cover of the novella 'Sustenance' by Ridley Park, displayed on a Kindle device and a paperback book. The cover depicts two aliens holding a pitchfork in a rural setting with a red barn and tractor in the background.
Cover art of ‘Sustenance’ by Ridley Park, featuring a rural Iowa setting with aliens.

Set in the heat-swept quiet of rural Iowa, Sustenance is a novella about first contact—not with ships or sirens, but with ideas and beings that refuse to fit our familiar categories.

It explores the gaps between language and meaning, the failure of cultural projection, and the discomfort that arises when consent, sex, and power don’t follow human scripts.

If that sounds abstract, it is. But it’s also intimate, bodily, and strangely domestic.

Themes

  • Language and miscommunication
  • Gender, sex, and social roles—disassembled
  • Cultural projection and the limits of empathy
  • Consent and the problem of understanding
  • Embodiment and alienation
  • Property, law, and the illusion of ownership
  • Memory and narrative as self-justification

Formats

📘 Available now on Amazon:

Also available in international Kindle storefronts.
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

Press & Links

Author

Written by Ridley Park—a name that sounds like a location, and perhaps is. Also the author of Hemo Sapiens and Propensity.