book review – Page 4

New Book Release: Temporal Babel

July 18, 2025July 18, 2025Posted in Book, Ridley Park, Status Update, Temporal Babel, WritingTagged babel, book review, books, communication breakdown, contact story, contemporary surrealism, desert fiction, fantasy, fiction, future English, indie author, language mystery, linguistic sci-fi, literary fiction, new release, philosophical fiction, phonetic drift, Ridley Park, Speculative Fiction, Temporal Babel, time displacementLeave a comment

An unsolved literary mystery where language fails first.

I’m thrilled to announce the release of my latest novella, Temporal Babel, now available in paperback and hardcover. It’s a story about a man who arrives with no language the world can understand—and the woman who tries to name him anyway.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Set in small-town New Mexico, Temporal Babel is not a thriller. It’s not about saving the future or rewriting the past. It’s about the weird middle ground where things don’t quite translate—linguistically, temporally, emotionally.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to encounter someone truly out of place—where even the word where doesn’t land—you’ll find something resonant in these pages.

What’s it about?

A young woman discovers a man on the roadside.
He’s naked. Marked with strange blue scars.
And the words coming out of his mouth aren’t quite English.
Or anything else.

No memory. No ID. No history that the town of Anika can decipher. But as he begins to recover, the sound of his voice becomes its own riddle.

Some readers may call this speculative fiction. Others might shelve it under linguistic noir. I just call it a contact story—minus the aliens, or is it?

Why read it?

🔹 If you enjoy novels that refuse to explain themselves, this one’s for you.
🔹 If you like language play, phonetic drift, and dialect as plot, this one delivers.
🔹 If you like stories where the weirdness builds slowly, quietly, without fireworks—you’ll feel right at home.

“Dis kē?” he asks.
What is this?
No one knows. Not even the narrator.

📖 Temporal Babel is available now in paperback and hardcover.

Read it for free with KindleUnlimited.

You can explore the book page here or head straight to your favourite indie or online retailer.

Thank you for reading, for puzzling, and for letting mystery have the final word.

—Ridley

Le deuxième sexe – What Rises After the Fall

July 18, 2025July 18, 2025Posted in Book, WritingTagged book review, books, cooperative future, cultural construction of woman, decentralised power, emotional literacy, feminist future fiction, feminist speculative fiction, fiction, gender and society, literary science fiction, matriarchy vs patriarchy, novel, philosophical fiction, podcast, post-capitalist culture, post-collapse world, post-Enlightenment society, power and otherness, resonance over dominance, Ridley Park blog, Science Fiction, Simone de Beauvoir, speculative novel concept, The Second Sex, utopia alternative, WritingLeave a comment

I’m reading The Second Sex. It’s a story of women, about women, for women, and by a woman—but it’s also a story of otherness.

This post isn’t about that book.

It’s a reflection on a premise within it: that woman is a cultural construction.

Written in 1949, before the language of gender identity emerged, Beauvoir’s work distinguishes “female” as biological sex and “woman” as imposed gender.
But this post isn’t about that either.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

A Novel Possibility

This is about a seed of an idea—one that took root while reading—and the novel it might become.

A near-future world.
Shaped not by vengeance, utopia, or techno-salvation.
But by a quiet unravelling of power itself.

It is not a story of triumph.
Nor of ruin.
It is the aftermath of both.

After Collapse, Reconstitution

When extractive systems—ecological, economic, ideological—collapse, society does not revert, rebuild, or resist.
It reconstitutes.

Not as hierarchy repainted in pastel.
Not as hive-mind in harmony drag.

But as a resonant ecology:
A decentralised, cooperative, post-Enlightenment culture in which traditional male-coded traits—dominance, control, instrumental reason—have become maladaptive relics.

What Rises

The values that rise—attunement, memory, restraint, emotional literacy—are neither glorified nor enforced.
They are simply what works now.

This is not a matriarchy.
Not a revenge fantasy.
Not feminism cast in steel and slogans.

It’s a structural inversion:
A world in which those trained for dominance find themselves culturally disarmed—
While the formerly subordinate, at last, inhabit a society scaled to their sensibilities.

No Brain, No Throne

There is no single ideology.
No central brain.
No throne.

Power does not pool.
It diffuses—like mycelium beneath a forest.

Language shifts.
Leadership evaporates.
Progress, once a sacred cow, is now met with suspicion.

Not out of fear of change,
But for love of equilibrium.

Still, Tensions Remain

A generation raised in scarcity seeks to anchor stillness.
A younger one, born amid calm, yearns for momentum.

Outside the collective, remnants of the old world stir—
Confused. Indignant. Armed.

And within, a few still long to lead.

These tensions are not resolved by war.
Nor suppressed by force.

This is not a tale of rebellion or revolution.
But of repatterning.
And its cost.

   Tone: Literary. Spare. Sensory realism.
   Influences: Atwood, Le Guin, Ishiguro, Butler.
   Conflict: Emotional. Ideological. Structural.
   Message: A level playing field was always a myth. The tilt now favours something new.

What Comes After

The question isn’t how to stop the old world from returning.
The question is whether it ever really left—
and if so,
what takes its place.

Notes from the Underground

July 16, 2025July 16, 2025Posted in Book, review, WritingTagged 19th century literature, absurdism, absurdist fiction, alienation, book review, books, classic novels, consciousness, dark humour, Death of Ivan Ilych, Dostoevsky, existentialism, free will, human psychology, literary criticism, literature, misanthropy, Notes from Underground, novella, philosophical fiction, philosophy, philosophy of suffering, proto-modernism, rationalism, reading, Russian literature, satire, self-sabotage, tolstoy, unreliable narrator1 Comment

★★★★★ – “I Am a Sick Man. I Am a Spiteful Man. I Am, Apparently, Hilarious.”

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a masterclass in misanthropic soliloquy — part philosophical treatise, part psychological farce, and altogether one of the most darkly entertaining monologues I’ve ever had the guilty pleasure of eavesdropping upon. It’s a screaming match between Enlightenment rationality and the petty, pulsing irrationality of actual human life — and guess who wins? (Hint: not the utopians.)

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The first part, a searing, feverish diatribe, reads like the diary of a man who’s been locked in a room with too much Hegel and not enough human contact. It’s Dostoevsky’s pre-emptive strike against every social engineer who’s ever said, “Well, surely man will behave if we just fix the plumbing.” The Underground Man begs to differ — loudly, neurotically, and with an almost Shakespearean flourish of self-abuse.

But it’s the second part — Apropos of the Wet Snow — where things truly fall gloriously apart. Here the theoretical gives way to the tragically tangible. Our narrator, more unhinged by the page, lurches into society like a moth into a bonfire — vengeful, humiliated, self-aware to the point of paralysis. His disastrous encounter with Liza is almost unbearable in its sincerity and cruelty, a pas de deux of hope and destruction that left me squirming and spellbound.

What surprised me most was the humour. Not the cheap slapstick of caricature, but the agonising, close-to-the-bone absurdity that arises when a man is too clever to be functional and too self-aware to change. The Underground Man doesn’t just dig his hole — he drafts blueprints, writes footnotes, and criticises the soil quality.

As a companion read, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych provides a poignant counterpoint. Where Tolstoy charts the steady, ghastly march of bourgeois conformity towards a deathbed revelation, Dostoevsky gives us a man already buried in his psyche, clawing at the dirt and calling it philosophy. Ivan Ilych dies trying to make sense of his life; the Underground Man lives trying to make death of sense itself.

Together, they are a fine Russian reminder that being alive is no guarantee of being well — or even remotely rational.

Book Review: The Emotional Craft of Fiction

June 28, 2025June 28, 2025Posted in Character, critique, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged book review, books, creative-writing, Donald Maass, editing, fiction, recommendation, Writing, writing tipsLeave a comment

Not Charlotte’s Web.

Instead, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass.

I just finished this book. I’ll say it’s good and even recommend it, but it’s not really for me. I wrote a blurb recently before I was even halfway through, and my opinion hasn’t changed.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

If you like to write in typical, character-driven stories, this should be right up your street. Besides character depth, the author also pushes moral righteousness. Thanks, but no thanks.

All of this said, I did gain some benefits from it, because although my writing is not heavily centred on characters, it does contain them, and I want them to feel alive. I want the world to feel lived in.

Personally, I think in schemes and threads – big ideas, deep ideas. Once all of this is roughly in place, I take a second pass for details. This is where Maass can help.

Full disclosure: Some people adopt a plotting approach to writing, whilst others adopt a pantser approach. I fall somewhere in between. Moreover, I might write something from one perspective and the next from the other – and I might flip-flop back and forth.

As a plotter, I might have waypoints that I want to hit, ideas I want to explore. Sometimes, I write these down on paper, in a spreadsheet, or somewhere to keep myself honest. Other times, I have these plot points in mind, but I take a stream-of-consciousness approach, simply discovering the story as it unfolds under my fingertips. I may even plot half a story and “pants” the rest of it. No telling.

As a pantser, I might have a kernel of an idea, and I just want to ideate on the page. So, I write. I lock myself in my room, throw up a “Do Not Disturb” sign, and head down to write until the well of ideas runs dry. At this point, I might put the idea aside or step back and consider plot points.

Looking back on this post, it’s not so much a book review at all. Apologies. That said, if you write characters and enjoy mainstream writing approaches, I think you’ll find the ideas in this book helpful. Many of the better ideas are presented early on, but it’s a short read. He offers some authors, titles, and excerpts you might find interesting. I found them to be a mixed bag.

Not a People Person

June 26, 2025June 26, 2025Posted in Book, Character, WritingTagged anti-morality, audiobooks, author voice, book review, books, character development, character tropes, Donald Maass, emotional craft, fiction, fiction writing, Jonathan Haidt, metanarrative, moral non-cognitivism, moral psychology, moral subversion, philosophical fiction, Ridley Park, Writing, writing philosophy, writing process, writing tips1 Comment

Person writing at a desh, on the wall behind him, scales of justice, drama masks, and a red heart

I Don’t Do People

I don’t write character-based fiction. I’m not a “people person” – not in the lived world, and certainly not on the page. I prefer people at arm’s length, ideally shrink-wrapped and on mute, where I can manage the terms of engagement.

Yes, my work features characters. I flesh them out just enough to spare readers the Ayn Rand experience, those one-dimensional ideological mannequins masquerading as protagonists. But character isn’t the centrepiece. I write to explore worldviews, metanarratives, and environmental interactions. I’m less interested in what a person feels and more in what their presence means within a broader system.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this topic.

Audible Irony

At the fitness centre (the irony isn’t lost on me), I listen to audiobooks. Today’s pick: The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. I’ve just cracked Chapter Four, and already I’ve panned a few glittering nuggets for future consideration.

That said, I found myself wondering: why am I even listening to a book so obsessed with the deep inner life of characters?

Simple. Because it’s still useful – even if I only dose it homeopathically. Just because I don’t write bleeding-heart confessions doesn’t mean I can’t exploit emotional undercurrents when it serves a structural or rhetorical purpose.

Character, Morality, and My Problem with Haidt

One section rubbed me the wrong way: the bit about character morality. Maass references Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology—yes, that Jonathan Haidt, patron saint of middlebrow centrism and moral-sentiment handwaving.

I’m familiar with Haidt. Not a fan. His notion of “moral elevation”—the idea that stories with virtuous themes inspire moral behaviour—strikes me as both quaint and quaintly manipulative. In a sense, I agree with him: morality is curated. But that’s where our Venn diagram becomes a shrug.

I’m a moral non-cognitivist. I won’t bore you here (though feel free to tumble down that rabbit hole over on my philosophical blog). In short, I don’t believe morals are objective truths handed down from Olympus or Enlightenment think-tanks. They’re socio-emotional artefacts – human constructs born from gut feelings, tempered by culture, and ossified into norms. Different contexts yield different values. That’s why I delight in yanking characters out of time and place, disorienting them – and you – to expose just how contingent it all is.

So yes, I understand moral tropes. I even deploy them. But I do so to subvert them – not to reinforce a collective bedtime story about “goodness” or “redemption.” Those are the myths we tell ourselves to stay sane. I’m here to loosen your grip.

Ballard’s High-Rise: When Brutalism Meets Behavioural Collapse

June 22, 2025June 22, 2025Posted in Book, critique, review, WritingTagged 1970s fiction, allegory, architecture and society, Art, Ballard, book review, books, British fiction, brutalism, class warfare, dystopian fiction, extrinsic motivation, High-Rise, JG Ballard, literary critique, mental-health, modern society, nihilism, novel, philosophical fiction, Ridley Park, satire, Science Fiction, social decay, stephen king, Writing1 Comment

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.

Book Review: Crash

June 20, 2025Posted in Book, review, Status UpdateTagged book review, books, crash, goodreads, J. G. Ballard, novel, reviewLeave a comment

Crash by J.G. Ballard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Neither did I like nor dislike Crash. It just was. It is different, though I can help feeling that it’s gratuitous and contrived. Perhaps it seemed edgy and read differently in the 1970s.

It appears to operate on repeated vignettes – a lot of repetition. I want to see a word cloud. As an author myself, ChatGPT suggested some of my work reads like Ballard. I started with The Atrocity Exhibition, but quickly set it aside due to a lack of continuity. I settled for Crash.

Perhaps I should try something else by Ballard before writing him off, but for now, he doesn’t make my recommended author list.

View all my reviews

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

May 27, 2025May 27, 2025Posted in Book, Hemo Sapiens, Interview, Ridley Park, Sustenance, WritingTagged alienation, book review, books, character estrangement, cultural constructs, existentialism, fiction writing, Geworfenheit, Heidegger, hemo sapiens, language insufficiency, literary theory, meaning-making, metaphysics, narrative motivation, narrative philosophy, otherness, philosophical fiction, philosophy, postmodern fiction, property and survival, reading, Speculative Fiction, storytelling and identity, Sustenance, Temporal Babel, thrownness, writer’s soliloquy, WritingLeave 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.

AutoCrit Challenges

March 11, 2025Posted in Artificial Intelligence, AutoCrit, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Short Story, Software, WritingTagged ai, AutoCrit, book review, book-reviews, books, characters, ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4, Claude, closure, consistency, critique, deepseek, editing, emotional quotient, emotions, eq, fiction, Generative AI, human condition, narratives, real life, reality, resolution, stories, variability, WritingLeave a comment

I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.

This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”

But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?

We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.

Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.

Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.

In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.

This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?

My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.

I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.

I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.

The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.

If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.

I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.

Book Review: The Blind Owl

August 18, 2024August 18, 2024Posted in Book, critique, review, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged Book, book review, existentialism, iran, novella, Persian, philosophics, review, summary, Writing1 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.