Tag: misunderstanding

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.

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.