alien encounter – Ridley Park

So what is Sustenance?

It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.

What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?

Sustenance is for readers who:

Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats.

Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness.

Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception.

Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement.

This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.

This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025.

Posted by

Ridley Park

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 →

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