Tag: fiction

Thank You for Sustenance Reviews

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Sustenance (available here) was free for everyone on Kindle on 8 and 9 September. My goal was to provide access to the book for exposure with the hope of getting ratings and reviews. It’s still early, but I’d like to report that over 100 people downloaded the Kindle version. Now, I’ll share some details.

  • The Kindle version was downloaded 106 times in the past two days.
  • Some read it from their KindleUnlimited accounts
  • Some bought physical copies
  • Some people rated the book; some even left reviews on Amazon or Goodreads

The ratings and reviews are mixed, but all are welcome. Few people rate books; even fewer review them, so I appreciate the effort.

I got 3 ratings and 2 reviews on Amazon: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, ⭐⭐⭐⭐, and ⭐. A one-star review. Thanks for that, too.

The ⭐rating didn’t leave a review, so I don’t know why they didn’t like it. I don’t know what types of books they read or this is exatcly what they prefer – they just didn’t like this. Still, at least they took the time to do it.

As a former statistician who has worked with survey data, I find this to be similar – most people don’t respond to surveys. Most people don’t engage in call-in shows. Most often, the people who respond either love or hate the topic so much that they feel compelled to broadcast their opinions. The people who say “meh” won’t even bother.

KindleUnlimited notwithstanding, I have no idea how people engage with a book. I have purchased and downloaded more books than I can read in a lifetime – probably multiple lifetimes. Sometimes, I just want to have access to a classic in case the mood strikes me; sometimes a book comes into view, and I convince myself that when I have the time, I might read it. I have no way of knowing.

Image: Sustenance Trope Board

I’m guilty of some single-star ratings without leaving a review, so I am in no position to point fingers. Sometimes a book seems bad that you want to warn the world, but you don’t want to expend more time on the endeavour that you already have.

I took this screengrab of 1-star ratings from Goodreads – some have reviewers, others don’t.

Image: 1-Star Reviews

Only one of these books is non-fiction, though I might argue that point, hence the single star.

One Ayn Rand was a class assignment. The other was someone telling me that I hadn’t judged her best work. In this case, her best work is one star, so I can skip anything else. Ditto for the Bible – complete dreck.

Authority, I only recently read. it was part of a trilogy. The other two books got 4 and 3 stars, so I’ll consider this one a dud. I’m not in good company, as it rated worse than the other two on average, yet still managed a 3.55. Some people liked it.

The last one was a class assignment for my son that I read with him. His rating matched mine. How it became an assignment is just testimony that there is no accounting for taste.

Also, as a public service, I’d be willing to bet that if you liked these books, you won’t like mine.

Octavia Butler’s Dawn

On the topic of rating— I am midway through Dawn. It’s mid. I was asked why I hadn’t read it as part of the dystopian Venn, so I picked it up. To be fair, I thought several of the stories on the Venn were mid themselves, classics or otherwise. Perhaps I’ll write a separate post on that someday.

Honestly, I’d give Dawn 2 stars. However, I also know that Sci-Fi is not a genre that resonates with me, so I’ll be generous and give it a star because it may just be my personal bias of not relating to Sci-Fi that’s the problem, and the book might be better received by fans of that genre. Offhand, the only fiction genres I dislike worse than Sci-Fi are Fantasy and Romance.

Aside from being Sci-Fi, it reads like YA fiction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with YA, but I am clearly not its target demographic. Other than that, it’s serviceable, but I prefer to read content that’s more complex and layered, not spoonfed to me.

Conclusion

Anyway, I’ve derailed this thread, but I wanted to clarify how I approach rating books and want to thank those of you who have taken the time on Sustenance. If you haven’t yet, I’d appreciate any rating from 1 to 5. Reviews earn extra karma points.

What’s With the Violet Aliens?

Posted in Art, Book, Cover Art, Ridley Park, Sci-Fi, Status Update, Sustenance, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

🛸 A Closer Look at the Cover of Sustenance

👽 People ask me: What’s with the aliens on the front cover of Sustenance?
Fair enough. Let’s talk about it.

Sustenance is set in Iowa – real, dusty, soybean-and-corn Iowa. I’ve spent months there. I’ve lived in the Midwest (including Chicago) for over a decade. The farms, the tractors, the gravel roads… they aren’t just set dressing. They’re part of the book’s DNA.

So, yes: we’ve got the requisite red barn, green tractor with yellow wheels (hi, John Deere 🚜), and a crop circle or two. The audiobook cover even features an alien peeking out of the barn – though logistics are holding that version back for now.

Please note that the Kindle version is available for free for the rest of today (8 Sep 25). Download your copy while you still can without paying through the nose. Leave a review for👍 better or for👎 worse.

But those aliens…

If the composition feels familiar, it should.

The cover is a quiet parody of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” – a pitchfork-wielding farmer and his companion, stoic before their rural home. It’s one of the most recognisable paintings in American art, and I couldn’t resist twisting it just slightly. Grant was an Iowa boy.

I designed this cover using a flat vector art style, almost like cut paper or stylised children’s book illustrations. The sky is cyan, the land is beige, and everything is built in clean layers: barn, tractor, field, crop circle, and of course… two violet, large-eyed aliens striking a pose.

But no, this isn’t a literal scene from the book. You might encounter violet aliens in Sustenance, but you won’t find them standing around with pitchforks like interstellar Grant Wood impersonators. The image is meant to evoke the tone, not transcribe the events.

Why this style?

Because the story itself is quiet. Subtle. Set in the kind of place often overlooked or written off. The aliens aren’t invading with lasers. They’re… complicated. And the humans, well, aren’t always the best ambassadors of Earth.

The cover reflects that blend of satire, stillness, and unease.

Oh, and one last note:
🛑 No aliens were harmed in the writing of this book.

Octavia Butler Dawn Crosspost

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I began reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and it raised some interesting* philosophical questions.

In the early chapters of Dawn, an alien declares that humanity has “committed mass suicide.” Sartre insists, “Inaction is still a choice.” Howard Zinn reminds us, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Each collapses complexity into the fiction of agency, a story that props up Modernist notions of responsibility and blame. But what if agency itself is an unnecessary fiction? I’ve explored this tension in a new essay on my Philosophics blog:

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Someone on social media, commenting on my Dystopian Venn post, asked me why I hadn’t read Octavia E Butler. Challenge accepted.

* Questions interesting to me.

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Free for Two Days Only: Sustenance (Kindle Edition)

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1–2 minutes

On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)

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

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

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

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Ice by Anna Kavan – Five Chapters In

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1–2 minutes

Five chapters down, and Anna Kavan’s Ice is already proving itself to be less a novel than a feverish novelette-length hallucination. It hits differently than the sprawling sagas I’ve been chewing through – leaner, sharper, like a shard of frozen glass pressed against the skin.

This isn’t realism. If you try to read it as realist narrative you’ll only tie yourself in knots, muttering that the protagonist keeps chasing a girl he half-admits isn’t even there. He catches glimpses, shadows, phantoms – and follows them anyway. Contrived? Yes, if you expect logic. Coherent? Absolutely, if you treat it as dream grammar, where compulsion replaces causality and the world obeys obsession more than physics.

The point-of-view is the real hall of mirrors. Not so much “unreliable narrator” as unreliable perspective: the voice flickers, sometimes inside his skull, sometimes inside hers, sometimes perched like an outside observer. As in a dream, identities blur. The supposed rescuer blurts out sadistic fantasies, sounding alarmingly like the blue-eyed Warden he claims to oppose. It’s less “out of character” than a reminder that character itself is already compromised.

So, no, you can’t hold this text to the rules of straight narrative. You have to read it the way you stumble through a nightmare: half-convinced, half-sceptical, fully captive.

Where it all leads? I’ve got perhaps seventy pages left to find out. For now, I’m letting the ice close over me, listening for the crunch of those imaginary bones.

EDIT: I’ve finished Ice and left a review on Goodreads. tl;dr: I gave it a 3 of 5 stars. ⭐⭐⭐ It was good. Mercifully it was short. As it reads like a dream sequence, there are no stakes. From the start, I wasn’t heavily invested in what happened to the protagonist nor the subject of his attrction. There were some good scenes, but not enough for me to give it more than a 3.

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The Veneer of Human Exceptionalism in Art

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Dall-E, Generative AI, Video, Writing, YouTubeTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Robotic La Joconde

I don’t want to develop a reputation as an AI apologist – I really don’t. But I do want to strip away the veneer humans so lovingly lacquer over themselves: the idea that art is some mystical emanation of a “soul,” accessible only to those blessed by the Muse and willing to suffer nobly in a garret.

Video: YouTube Short by Jonny Thompson of his interview with Rachel Barr

Rachel Barr argues that AI art can never be the same as human art, no matter how “perfect,” because AI has no feelings or drive. Cue the violins. These arguments always seem to hinge on metaphysical window-dressing. When Rachel says “we”, she’s not talking about humanity at large; she’s talking about herself and a very particular subset of humans who identify as artists. And when she invokes “masters”, the circle shrinks still further, to the cloistered guild who’ve anointed themselves the keepers of aesthetic legitimacy.

But here’s the bit they’d rather you didn’t notice: feelings and drive aren’t prerequisites for art. They’re just one of the many myths humans tell about art, usually the most flattering one. Strip away the Romantic varnish and art is often craft, habit, accident, repetition. A compulsive tic in oil paint. A mistake on the guitar that somehow worked. A poet bashing words together until something sticks.

And I say this not as a detached observer but as a writer, artist, and musician in my own right. I sympathise with the instinct to defend one’s turf, but I don’t need to steep myself in hubris to retain self-worth. My work stands or falls on its own. It doesn’t require a metaphysical monopoly.

So when someone insists AI art can never be “the same,” what they mean is it doesn’t flatter our myths. Because if an algorithm can spit out a perfect sonnet or an exquisite image without the tortured soul attached, then what have we been worshipping all this time? The art itself, or the halo around the artist?

Perhaps the real fear isn’t that AI art lacks feelings. It’s that human art doesn’t require them either. And that’s a blow to the species ego – an ego already so fragile it cracks if you so much as ask whether the Mona Lisa is just paint on a board.

Gattaca (1997): Completing the List, But at What Cost?

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1–2 minutes

At last, the circle is complete. I’ve slogged through the full dystopia roster, the canonical set so beloved of memes and Venn diagrams. Orwell, Atwood, Burgess, Huxley – and now, Gattaca. Completion is satisfying, but the price of admission? Almost two hours of cinema so wooden you could build an ark.

The problem is not the premise. Genetic determinism as a caste system is a fine conceit – prescient even. But the execution? Trite, contrived, and about as subtle as an Ayn Rand sermon. This is a film with zero degrees of freedom: a script where every outcome is preordained, every obstacle contrived, every subplot bent double to guarantee Vincent’s ascent. It rails against determinism while embodying it.

And the characters? Archetypes in pressed suits. Vincent, the plucky underdog. Jerome, the fallen aristocrat with a liquor cabinet. Irene, the sceptical love interest who abruptly switches sides because the script tells her to. They don’t act, they oblige. It could just as easily have been written in the 1940s, swapped in for a Jimmy Stewart melodrama about class prejudice, courtroom vindication, and the triumph of the “human spirit.” The only modern touch is the genome gimmick.

Yes, admirers gush about its minimalism, its prescience, its “timeless” style. But strip back the sleek lines and moody jazz soundtrack, and you’re left with fortune-cookie profundities (“There is no gene for the human spirit”) welded onto a Rube Goldberg plot. It’s not timeless; it’s tired.

So yes, I’ve ticked it off the list. But at what cost? I endured the dialogue, the implausible sequencing, the endless plot coupons masquerading as destiny. Gattaca may live on in classrooms and think-pieces, but as cinema it collapses under its own deterministic weight.

Completion achieved. Satisfaction minimal.

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Ridley at Uni

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student writing
2–3 minutes

I never took creative writing courses at university. I wanted to, but I was shackled to a double major in economics and finance, worlds far removed from literature. With only four free electives to spend, I squandered them on philosophy (which, in retrospect, I should have pursued outright). That’s a story for another day. I did manage to complete a couple of critical writing courses and a couple of literature courses, and those linger in my memory.

My critical writing professor was a lesbian feminist. She assigned us nothing but female authors – save one strange detour, when I was made to compare Gloria Steinem with Thorstein Veblen on economics. In our very first class, she asked for a handwritten sample, pen on paper, no dictionaries, no spellcheck. This was the late ’80s; such tools barely existed. My handwriting was atrocious then – as now –, so I resorted to all-caps block letters. She commented on the novelty. She was a marvellous teacher.

My first literature professor adored poetry, though I did not. He made the best of it. He also had a curious fixation on penguins and mocked the way I pronounced finance (short “i,” the way I still say it). He was equally amused when I once asked to “interject” – apparently not the word he thought I should have chosen.

My last literature professor was enthralled by all things American. Our reading list was composed entirely of American writers, perhaps some women among them, though I don’t recall. Before his class, their works didn’t quite resonate with me. Still, it was enjoyable. He also insisted that one must understand an author’s history to grasp the text, an idea Barthes would have scoffed at. He, in turn, scoffed at Barthes.

My favourite moment came at the end. After the term ended, he posted back our final essays. On mine, he scribbled two lines alongside the grade:

I’ll miss your sardonic humour.
My name is not David Grace.

I had typed the wrong name on the title page – borrowing one from a maths professor whose name stuck, while my literature professor’s did not. I still can’t recall his name. But I remember him fondly all the same.

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The Dystopia Venn: Four Circles of Absolute Nonsense

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2–3 minutes

This particular meme has been making the rounds like a drunk uncle at a wedding – loud, colourful, and convinced it’s profound. A Venn diagram, no less! Four big circles stuffed with dystopias, slapped together as if geometry itself conferred wisdom. Most of them are books, a few are films, and one – Gattaca – is glaring at me because I haven’t seen it. That omission alone feels like a character flaw. I might grit my teeth and watch it just to close the loop, though it doesn’t exactly scream, “Pour a glass of wine and enjoy.”

DISCLAIMER: This is not a political post.

Image: Venn Diagram

Here’s the thing: as art, it’s rather lovely. As a piece of intellectual cartography? It’s rubbish. It pretends to classify but in fact it merely collages. Orwell is pressed up against Burgess, Atwood rubs shoulders with Logan’s bloody Run, and in the middle sits Animal Farm, as if pigs with clipboards are somehow the Rosetta Stone of dystopia.

And yet – if you squint just so, tilt your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, you can just about see some tenuous ligatures:

  • Surveillance and conditioning: 1984, Clockwork Orange, and The Matrix all insist that the human mind is clay to be moulded by boot, syringe, or simulation.
  • Reproduction and regulation: Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, and yes, Gattaca (apparently) fret endlessly over who gets to breed, who gets culled, and whose DNA deserves a future.
  • Bodies as resource: Soylent Green, Brazil, Gattaca again – people ground down into spreadsheets, rations, or literal mince.
  • The veneer of civilisation: Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm showing us that civilisation is just papier-mâché over the swamp.

But let’s be honest: the diagram isn’t actually saying this. It’s just four intersecting blobs, with titles hurled in like darts at a pub quiz. The apparent “structure” is nothing more than meme-magic – order conjured out of chaos to make you nod gravely as you scroll by.

So yes: as art, it works. As a Venn diagram, it’s a travesty. And maybe that’s the deeper joke. We live in an age where every complexity gets crushed into an infographic, every horror squeezed into a digestible meme. Which, if you think about it, is itself a bit dystopian.

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