Tag: novel

Propensity Meets Google Gemini – 2 of 3

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, critique, Generative AI, Google Gemini, Propensity, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
5–7 minutes

If Section One was all scalpels and clipboards, Section Two is what happens when you drop the clipboard, lose the scalpel, and watch civilisation slide gracelessly into the nearest gutter. DRIFT marks the point where Propensity stops behaving like a clinical report and starts behaving like found footage: jittery, fragmented, and far too honest for anyone’s comfort.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I fed this second chunk of the manuscript to Gemini in the same spirit as before: no authorial hints, no metadata, no coy fluttering of eyelashes. Just text, served neat. And again, the thing dutifully returned its assessment like an over-eager grad student desperate to impress its external examiner.

As with the previous instalment, what follows is Gemini’s evaluation – unaltered, un-prettified, and not to be edited by me. Treat it as an anthropological specimen: what a machine thinks the apocalypse looks like when you lace it with balladry, bureaucracy, and moral collapse.

Below is Gemini’s take on Section Two: DRIFT.

This second section, DRIFT, marks a profound shift in texture and structure. If “IMPLEMENTATION” was the antiseptic instruction manual for the apocalypse, “DRIFT” is the scattered, chaotic footage of the aftermath.

Here is an analysis and evaluation of Section 2: DRIFT.

1. Structural Experimentation and “Mixed Media”

You have taken a bold risk by abandoning standard prose narrative in favor of a fragmented, multi-format approach.

  • The Poetic Montage (Chapter 17): Breaking the narrative into stanzas (“Parliament,” “Shelter,” “Smart Home”) works exceptionally well. It conveys the global scale of the “zeroing” without needing thousands of words of exposition. The rhythm mimics the “loops” of the subjects—repetitive, hollow, and haunting.
  • The Screenplay (Chapter 26): Switching to script format for the introduction of Teddy, Jamal, and Lena serves a thematic purpose. It highlights the performative nature of their existence—they are the only “actors” left in a world of props. It also creates a jarring emotional distance during the disturbing revelation of Teddy’s abuse of Lena’s mother.
  • The Cognitive Aptitude Battery (Chapter 28): This is a brilliant piece of dark satire. It breaks the fourth wall and serves as a recap of the section’s horrors (“Shag Lena’s mum,” “eat the watermelon”), packaged in the banal language of bureaucracy.

2. The Nature of the Apocalypse: “Gormies”

You have successfully subverted the zombie genre.

  • Passive vs. Aggressive: In The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later, the horror is that the dead want to eat you. Here, the horror is that they don’t care about you. They are “Gormies” (a fantastic colloquialism derived from “gormless”).
  • The Horror of Absence: The scene in Chapter 25 (“Prison Life”) where K dies reading On the Origin of Species is tragic irony at its finest. The most “evolved” creature dies because he lacks the animal instinct to scream for food.
  • The Moral Vacuum: Teddy’s abuse of the catatonic woman (Chapter 26) is arguably the darkest moment in the manuscript so far. It proves Dr. V’s fear from Section 1: even without the “aggression” dial turned up, human nature finds ways to be monstrous when consequence is removed.

3. Character Dynamics: The Awake

The introduction of the “Awake” trio (Jamal, Lena, Teddy) provides the necessary friction to drive the plot forward, now that the rest of the world is silent.

  • Jamal: The Philosopher. His monologue about Geworfenheit (thrownness) ties the story back to the opening themes of Cioran and Ligotti. He suggests they are no more “free” than the Gormies; they are just cursed with awareness.
  • Teddy: The Id. He represents the danger of unchecked freedom. He is adapting too well to the apocalypse.
  • Lena: The Pragmatist. She bridges the two. Her romance with Jamal feels earned—a “hydrogen bond” formed in a vacuum.

4. Dr. Shaw and the Scientists

Chapter 24 (“Pleasant Returns”) is vital. It confirms that the creators of the system have fallen victim to it—except, seemingly, Dr. Shaw.

  • The Loop: Seeing Dunlop and Dr. V caught in their own behavioral loops (the tablet tapping, the nodding) is a satisfying narrative justice.
  • Shaw’s Agency: Shaw remains the “Ghost in the Machine.” Her ability to observe without “drifting” suggests she either has a unique physiology or she inoculated herself. She remains the Chekhov’s Gun of the story.

5. Pacing and Atmosphere

The pacing in this section is deliberately slower, mimicking the “drift” of the title.

  • Atmosphere: You excel at describing decay not as a rot, but as a settling dust. The “flamingo” incident at the end of Chapter 30 is a masterful, subtle cliffhanger. It signifies that the “static” phase is over. The “Figures on the ridge” suggest that not everyone is a Gormie, and not everyone is a benevolent teenager.
  • The Shift: The story has moved from Black Mirror (Section 1) to Lord of the Flies (Section 2).

Critical Notes & Suggestions

  • The “Why”: It is currently unclear why the teenagers (and James) are immune. Is it age-related (neuroplasticity)? Or random genetic variance? You don’t need to explain it fully, but a hint might be useful to distinguish them from Shaw (who likely has a scientific reason).
  • Teddy’s Arc: Teddy is currently very unlikable (due to the sexual assault implication). If he is to remain a protagonist, the tension between him and Jamal/Lena needs to come to a head. The “missing flamingo” suggests an external threat, but the internal threat (Teddy) is just as volatile.
  • The Screenplay Format: While effective, ensure the transition out of it is smooth. Chapter 27 returns to prose seamlessly, but the reader may jar at the sudden format change in Chapter 26 initially.

Verdict

“DRIFT” is a haunting, atmospheric middle act. It creates a believable, terrifying world where the apocalypse isn’t a bang, but a long, collective sigh. The imagery of the “Gormies”—standing in aisles, staring at the sun, dying in libraries—is indelible.

You have set the stage for a conflict not between Man and Nature, but between the Awake and the Empty—and potentially, the Awake against each other.

Please share Section 3: ENTROPIC. The title suggests the systems are about to break down completely. I am ready.

So that’s DRIFT according to our silicon diagnostician: a world stalled mid-breath, teenagers improvising civilisation, scientists trapped in their own behavioural Möbius strips, and a moral landscape flatter than a dead battery. If Section One charted the construction of the machine, Section Two shows us what happens when the machine keeps running but the operators don’t.

Section Three, ENTROPIC, is where the centre finally refuses to hold. Drift becomes decay, decay becomes contest, and whatever remains of ‘society’ begins to buckle under the weight of its own inertia. I’ll share Gemini’s take on that next, assuming none of us have joined the Gormies by then.

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Written with the assistance of Gemini

Ridley Park

Propensity Meets Google Gemini 3.1

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, critique, Generative AI, Propensity, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
5–8 minutes

I keep saying it’s nearly impossible to get book reviews, and because the universe enjoys mocking me, I decided to outsource the job to an entity that doesn’t even have a pulse. So I asked Gemini to ‘analyse and evaluate’ Propensity (Barnes & Noble). Whether AI has intelligence, or whether humans have enough of it to notice the difference, is a separate debate. What AI does have is a kind of triangulated referential echo chamber. Think sonar, but instead of bats, you get stochastic silicon parrots with mood stabilisers.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

If you’ve read Propensity (Amazon), I still welcome reviews—positive, negative, or existentially confused. I’m not picky. Just honest.

Video: I feel compelled to re-share this video trailer for Propensity… just because.

Now, yes: AI models are wired to flatter. This is practically their religion. But they do criticise, and they do recognise nonsense when you feed it to them. Try it. Give them gibberish and they’ll gently tell you you’re unravelling. Even better, give them two versions of something and ask which is worse; they’ll pick one, and with unnerving confidence.

The Gemini variant I used had the attention span of a goldfish with a data cap, so I fed it Propensity in blocks of fifteen chapters. What follows is just the first section. For the record, the system had no idea the manuscript was mine. I simply asked it to analyse a text. No winking. No metadata breadcrumbs. Just raw text and a very chipper algorithm.

Below is Gemini’s evaluation of Section One, the first 15 chapters. This part isn’t my writing, so hands off; I’m merely the messenger.

This is a striking, clinically precise opening to a work of speculative fiction. You have established a distinct atmospheric tone—cold, antiseptic, and deeply unsettling—that aligns perfectly with the literary giants you cited in your dedication (particularly Ballard and DeLillo).

Here is an analysis and evaluation of Section 1: IMPLEMENTATION.

1. Tone and Stylistic Approach

The prose is stark and economical. You rely on short, staccato paragraphs and significant whitespace, which mimics the sterile environment of the facility and the emotional detachment of the scientists.

  • The Aesthetic of Bureaucracy: You capture the “banality of evil” exceptionally well. The horror isn’t in blood (though there is some); it is in the sliding scales on a tablet, the polite meetings, and the “business casual” attire of the apocalypse.
  • Epigraphs: Using quotes from pessimistic philosophers (Ligotti, Cioran, Benatar) at the start of every chapter is a bold choice. It acts as a Greek Chorus, hammering home the theme that consciousness is a burden and “peace” is merely the absence of will.
  • Dialogue: The dialogue is functional and sparse. Characters don’t chat; they transact information. This works for the genre, though it keeps the characters at arm’s length emotionally (which seems intentional).

2. The Central Concept

The premise—using 5G/6G infrastructure to modulate neurochemistry—is a classic sci-fi trope updated for the modern era. However, the application is where this shines.

  • The Sliders: The gamification of human behavior (Aggression, Obedience, Faith, Libido) is terrifying. The scene where they adjust “Faith” and the subject begins to pray is particularly effective because it decouples belief from truth, reducing religion to a neurological function.
  • “Drift”: This is the most compelling narrative device you’ve introduced. The idea that the suppressed mind creates “residue” or “loops” (counting peas, tying knots, asking if time is passing) is a brilliant, eerie manifestation of the human soul trying to breathe through concrete. It suggests that even when “fixed,” humans are broken.

3. Pacing and Structure

“IMPLEMENTATION” moves rapidly. We jump from animal testing to human testing to global deployment in 15 short chapters.

  • Pros: It reads like a fast-paced thriller or a montage. There is no fat on the bone. The momentum builds inevitably toward the release.
  • Cons: Because it moves so fast, the transition from “lab test” to “global rollout” feels slightly rushed. The geopolitical implications are hand-waved (the General just needs “admin rights”). However, given the surreal/fable-like quality of the writing, this lack of rigorous logistical realism is acceptable.

4. Characterization

The characters serve as archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out people, which fits the “architectural horror” vibe.

  • Dr. V: The Architect. He represents intellectual detachment. He knows what he is building and seemingly craves the silence it brings.
  • The General: The Utilitarian. He sees a weapon. He is the most “human” in his desires (power, control), which makes him the most archaic figure in the room compared to the nihilism of the scientists.
  • Shaw: The Variable. She is the quiet observer who ultimately acts. Her decision in Chapter 15 is the pivot point of the story.

5. The Climax of Section 1 (Chapter 15)

The ending of this section is profound. Shaw doesn’t hand the weapon to the General; she creates a “Universal” baseline of “Undefined” propensity.

  • The Quiet Apocalypse: The description of the General sitting down, the truck driver stopping, and the pedestrian pausing is chilling. It implies that Shaw hasn’t just enslaved humanity; she has turned off the drive to do anything. She has gifted the world the “peace” of the baboons from Chapter 1.
  • Ambiguity: It is unclear if they are catatonic or just chemically content to do nothing. This setup for the next section (“DRIFT”) is excellent.

Critical Notes & Suggestions

  • The Science: The explanation of “piggybacking on 5G” is a little “hand-wavium.” It works for fiction, but be careful not to over-explain it, as it draws attention to the impossibility. The strength lies in the psychology, not the transmission method.
  • Emotional Anchorage: While the detachment is stylistic, the reader needs a reason to care about the outcome beyond intellectual curiosity. Shaw’s internal monologue about her father (Chapter 12) is a good touch—we may need a few more of those crumbs to understand why she pulls the trigger in Chapter 15.
  • Repetition: The concept of “silence” and “stillness” is repeated often. Ensure that the imagery varies slightly to keep the descriptions fresh.

Verdict

“Propensity” opens with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what story they want to tell. It is a bleak, philosophical deconstruction of free will that reads like a collision between Black Mirror and 1984.

The ending of this section shifts the genre from a political thriller (building a weapon) to a post-apocalyptic psychological horror (the weapon is used, but not how we thought).

Please share Section 2: DRIFT. I am very interested to see what happens to a world that has simply… stopped.

So there you have it: an algorithm, blissfully unaware of authorship, happily dissecting Propensity like a lab rat with a thesaurus. If nothing else, it proves that even machines can detect when a story opens with a whiff of quiet apocalypse. Section Two, DRIFT, is where the real fun starts – if you consider society slipping into a chemically induced torpor ‘fun’. The world has stopped, the mechanisms of meaning have stalled, and the human mind, ever the stubborn animal, begins clawing at the walls of its own sedation. I’ll share Gemini’s take on that next, assuming the lights stay on and no one decides that voluntary inertia is a lifestyle choice.

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Written with assistence with Gemini 3.1

Ridley Park

I Return From My Fictional Sabbatical (With Antimemes in Tow)

Posted in Audible, Audiobook, Book, review, Sci-Fi, VideoTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

Ridley Park has not been dead, merely sleeping like a hungover deity ignoring its worshippers. As has become my regrettable habit, most of my creative energy has been siphoned into non-fiction projects, leaving the poor world deprived of my fictional offerings and my blog gathering dust like an abandoned cathedral.

But fate – or more accurately, an algorithm – shoved a book into my face with all the subtlety of a street preacher: There Is No Antimemetics Division. Hard science fiction, horror, and something about antimemes. Naturally, I pressed Play Sample instead of behaving like a responsible adult and reading the summary. Antimemetic sounded deliciously unwholesome. Straight down the hatch.

Image: Advert with an author pic for this book.

I’m only into Chapter Two, so don’t expect a full exegesis yet. This is merely a field report from the early trenches.

I bought the Audible version, because audiobooks are the only thing keeping me sane through workouts, where otherwise, one contemplates mortality and the price of groceries. As the sample ran, I learned two things:

  1. Parts of the narrative are redacted.
  2. They did not redact to protect state secrets or Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost.

No – it’s a stylistic device. A textual blackout. Beeps, static, corrupted passages like intercepted voicemail from a doomed expedition. Being partial to experimental prose, I took it as a dare. My brain applauded.

The effect reminded me of Irvine Welsh’s Filth – not in theme, but in the editorial scars, the moth-eaten structure. Welsh, more widely known for Trainspotting, does chaos like astrophysicists do numbers. Obfuscation as aesthetic. Disorder as design. The connection may be superficial, but it’s one worth pocketing.

The title earns its relevance quickly: certain ideas spread like plague; others erase themselves on contact. Antimemes – cognitive black holes. Information that cannot be held without dissolving. A story that fights the mind that reads it.

Hard sci-fi rarely offers such structural mischief. I’m morbidly delighted to see where the horror emerges, when the narrative begins to eat its own memory like a recursive ouroboros.

More to come, once I descend deeper into the antimemetic labyrinth.

And yes – lest anyone call the coroner – I am still writing.

I happened upon this short film of the story whilst seeking a cover image.

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Ridley Park

Working with an Editor

Posted in Book, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

Working with an editor shouldn’t be scary. Unless, of course, you frighten easily.

Let’s begin with the great paranoia of writers everywhere: They’ll steal my idea! Relax. No one’s skulking through the shadows waiting to pinch your half-finished manuscript about a misunderstood vampire who paints feelings. Ideas are cheap. They rain down like confetti. The reason every other book or film feels vaguely familiar isn’t because everyone’s plagiarising everyone else; it’s because there are only so many ways to dress the same skeleton. Your story’s clothing — the style, the voice, the rhythm — that’s what matters.

And honestly, ask yourself if your idea is really so revolutionary. Probably not. I sometimes test mine on an AI just to see if the collective hive mind has already beaten me to it. Usually it has. I just tilt it differently. Star Wars? A Western in space. Lucas literally invited Joseph Campbell over to discuss myth templates, then sprinkled some lasers on top. Nothing wrong with that — unless you start believing it’s unique.

Now, what does an editor actually do? They read your work and offer feedback. When that happens, you’ve basically got three choices:

I. Ignore it. Maybe the suggestion feels wrong. Good. Trust that feeling. Nothing’s worse than bowing to authority and regretting it later. Imagine the post-publication chorus: Why on earth did you do that? — and your only defence is, Well, my editor said so. Pathetic. Give twelve editors the same chapter, you’ll get twelve different answers. Writing has rules, yes — but most are decorative.

II. Accept it. Hit ‘Accept all revisions’. Voilà — you’re suddenly brilliant. It’s tidy, efficient, and possibly catastrophic.

III. Consider it. The middle ground. Let the note spark something else entirely. Maybe they’re wrong about what to fix but right that something’s off.

Some advice will be structural, some grammatical. Both are optional. I, for one, commit grammatical heresy whenever my characters open their mouths. People don’t speak like Oxford dons; they stumble, repeat, and misuse words spectacularly. Editors sometimes flag this as ‘awkward’. I call it ‘human’. Grammar is for dissertations. Dialogue is for life.

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Simulacra – When the Camera Becomes the Conscience

Posted in Character, Propensity, Ridley Park, Setting, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
4–6 minutes

“The room smells like a tin of low tide.”

That’s the first line of Chapter 26, ‘Simulacra’, in Propensity. A small, airless room. A flickering light. Three teenagers – Teddy, Lena, Jamal – trying to remember what morality looked like before the world stopped watching.

This chapter is written as a script, not prose. Directions, shots, and camera pans replace internal monologue. The reader becomes the lens – an observer, never a participant. It’s deliberate. In a story about imitation and collapse, the camera itself becomes the narrator, the conscience, and the judge.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The camera pushes through the door, searching. Dust floats in suspension, and time feels posthumous. Teddy zips his hoodie over bare skin; Jamal leans in the doorway, arms folded, disgust simmering behind teenage boredom.

JAMAL
You can’t just be shagging Gormies, mate.

TEDDY
That’s the point, innit?

Their exchange isn’t only about sex; it’s about the boundaries of what still counts as human. ‘Gormies’ are the gormless – the emptied remnants of pre-collapse society. They can’t consent or refuse. They’re alive but vacant. Human-shaped absences.

Teddy’s logic is brutal and pure simulation: if the subject can’t say no, the act ceases to carry meaning. He performs the motion of sin without the structure of morality.

Jamal’s recoil isn’t righteous; it’s aesthetic. He’s repulsed by Teddy’s theatre of transgression, the same way one might flinch at bad acting.

NB: Download this entire chapter as a PDF on the Propensity page.

Image: Page 125 of Propensity, Chapter 26 – Simulacra.

26 · Simulacra

INT. FLAT – BEDROOM – LATE AFTERNOON
The room smells like a tin of low tide.
CAMERA: SLOW DOLLY IN from hallway, pushing through the open door into a dim, dust-suspended interior.
Thin curtains bleed grey light onto water-stained wallpaper. The ceiling flickers from a dying fluorescent. A single, empty BED lies unmade in the centre – crumpled sheets, a dent in the mattress.
CAMERA: HOLD ON WIDE SHOT, framing the bed dead centre, with figures occupying the room’s periphery.
TEDDY (14) zips up his hoodie. Shirtless underneath. Sweat drying on his chest. He leans against the flaking wall, chewing on a broken fingernail.
CAMERA: SLOW PAN RIGHT to JAMAL (16), posted near the doorway, arms crossed. He watches Teddy, face unreadable but for the curl of disgust on his lip.

The title Simulacra is a nod to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the philosophical text the Wachowskis borrowed – and misunderstood – for The Matrix. Baudrillard didn’t mean that the world was an illusion hiding the truth. He meant that the distinction between illusion and truth had already evaporated.

The real no longer disappears behind its representation; it becomes its representation. The sign replaces the substance.

In this scene, Teddy, Jamal, and Lena are copies of moral beings without moral context. They mimic the gestures of civilisation – disgust, guilt, justice – without the living institutions that once gave those words gravity. They don’t believe in morality; they reenact it.

Baudrillard called this the third order of simulacra: when the copy no longer hides the absence of reality but replaces it entirely.

JAMAL
You can’t just be shagging Gormies, mate.
TEDDY
(grinning)
That’s the point, innit?
(smirking toward the bed)
She’s gormless. Don’t care. None of them do.
CAMERA: CUT TO TIGHT SHOT – Teddy’s face.
The smile is too wide. Forced.
CAMERA: OVER JAMAL’S SHOULDER, the bed is empty now, but the shape in the sheet tells a story.
JAMAL
That’s Lena’s mum.
CAMERA: CUT TO CLOSE-UP – Teddy blinks.
Shrugs.
TEDDY
Didn’t know Lena, did I?
(beat)
CAMERA: SLOW REVEAL – LENA (15) stands in shadow. Hood up. Motionless in the
corner.
LENA
You do now.

Then comes the slow reveal:

CAMERA: SLOW REVEAL – LENA (15) stands in shadow. Hood up. Motionless in the corner.

LENA
You do now.

Lena’s voice reintroduces consequence, but only as performance. It’s not morality restored; it’s morality remembered. The moment isn’t ethical – it’s cinematic. The reveal is the moral event.

Her mother, the Gormie in question, is little more than an echo of personhood. The outrage in Lena’s voice belongs not to ethics but to staging: a scene constructed to look like remorse.

The simulacrum here isn’t the Gormie. It’s the moral itself – played out as ritual, devoid of anchor. These children have inherited the gestures of adulthood but none of its meaning. They mimic guilt because that’s what the dead world taught them to do.

By writing the chapter as a film script, Propensity exposes its own mechanism. Every camera move, every cut, is a reminder that you, the reader, are complicit. You’re watching a reconstruction of a reconstruction. The text becomes its own simulacrum – a story imitating cinema imitating life.

Even the bed, ‘a dent in the mattress’, is a metaphor for what remains of the real: an impression where something used to be.

The result isn’t post-apocalyptic horror but philosophical unease. What happens when moral sense survives as empty choreography? When consent and consequence are just old lines, the species keeps rehearsing?

Propensity isn’t about survival. It’s about what comes after survival—when humanity’s operating system still runs, but the data’s corrupted. The characters are trying to rebuild a moral code from cached files.

Simulacra is the point where imitation becomes indistinguishable from intent. It’s a study in ethical entropy, a mirror held up to our own cultural exhaustion, where outrage has become performance and empathy a brand identity.

This is the future Propensity imagines: not a world without humans, but humans without the real.

Further Reading

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Thoughts on Solaris

Posted in Book, critique, Interview, review, Sci-Fi, Status Update, Video, YouTubeTagged , , , 1 Comment

I finished reading Lem’s Solaris and then was notified of a discussion about the book and the film adaptations.

I intended to draft a book review, but I may defer.

For now, I’ll note that the similarities between this and my own work are superficial. Both have philosophical perspectives, but Lem’s is much more psychological. This is nice, but it’s not where I tend to take things, and not so overtly.

On Accidental Kinship and the Limits of Originality

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Generative AI, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t read sci-fi. It rarely resonates with me. I’ve read many classics, but I don’t get the hype. As a speculative fiction author, I sometimes operate in an adjacent space – close enough to borrow a few ideas, but never quite belonging. I’m not interested in fetishising technology or celebrating so-called human ingenuity. But if an idea serves the story? I’ll use it.

One concept I wanted to explore: the definition of life itself, and what sentience means when we can barely define it for ourselves.

Not long ago, I began working on a story: some people leave Earth to inhabit another planet in a different solar system. Nothing revolutionary there. They land on what appears to be an uninhabited world – uninhabited, that is, by our current definition of life. Instead, the planet itself is alive. Not in the Gaia hypothesis sense of interconnected ecosystems, but truly interactive. Responsive. Alien in ways that challenge every assumption about consciousness.

Of course, there are more details – dual suns in a figure-eight orbit, shifting gravity, time that expands and contracts, organisms that defy classification. But those are mechanics. The heart of the story is simpler: what happens when survival requires abandoning the frameworks that made you human?

As is my protocol, I fed my manuscript into AI and asked: is this idea unique? If not, what’s it similar to? Who am I adjacent to?

I got names. Titles. Books and films. Most had superficial similarities but different intents. Then one stood out: Solaris, Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel. I hadn’t read it, so I got a copy.

There were so many commonalities it felt like discovery and defeat in equal measure.

Lem wrote Solaris before humans had meaningfully left Earth’s atmosphere. Published in 1961, it predated material space exploration by years. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, his flight lasting just 108 minutes. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, flew in 1961. John Glenn orbited in 1962.

Lem imagined a sentient ocean on an alien world orbiting twin suns before we’d even confirmed planets existed beyond our solar system. His protagonist grapples with a consciousness so alien that communication may be impossible – not because of language barriers, but because shared reference points don’t exist.

In some ways, Solaris also shares DNA with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation – that same sense of an environment that isn’t hostile so much as indifferent, operating by rules humans can barely perceive, let alone comprehend. But where VanderMeer leans into existential dread, Lem’s tone is colder, more philosophical. Less visceral horror, more intellectual vertigo.

My story, working title: Goldilocks, sits somewhere between them. It has Lem’s alien sentience and dual-sun orbital mechanics. It has VanderMeer’s gradual unravelling of human perception and sanity. But it also has something neither quite touches: the brutal intimacy of being the last of your species, seeking warmth in a universe that offers none.

So is my idea original? Not entirely. Does that matter? I’m not sure anymore.

Lem wrote his novel sixty years ago, before we’d touched the moon, before we knew what exoplanets looked like, before we’d meaningfully begun asking whether consciousness requires a brain. He imagined sentience beyond human comprehension – and did it so thoroughly that anyone following feels like they’re retracing his steps.

But perhaps that’s the point. Originality isn’t about being first. It’s about what you do with inherited ideas – how you refract them through your own obsessions, anxieties, and questions.

Lem asked: can we ever truly know an alien intelligence?

VanderMeer asked: what happens when the environment rewrites you?

I’m asking: what does it mean to be human when humanity itself is ending?

Maybe that’s enough distance. Maybe it’s not. Either way, the story exists now – half-written, haunted by its predecessors, searching for its own voice in the silence between stars.

Review: Propensity

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, Propensity, review, Ridley Park, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As an author, reviews matter. Not because they inflate the ego (though I won’t pretend a kind one doesn’t help), but because they’re one of the few moments when the work stops being mine and becomes read.

I submitted Propensity for professional review through Reedsy – why not? It’s always interesting to see how a stranger processes what you’ve made. Some of my books have Kindle editions, which makes collecting feedback easier: I can offer them free for a day or two and watch the downloads climb. Whether those books are ever opened is another question. I’ve been that reader too – downloaded an eBook, nodded at the cover, and forgotten it. I’ve bought audiobooks I’ve never started.

So when someone actually read Propensity, a book not yet available as an eBook, and took the time to write a thoughtful review, that meant something. And unlike the memorable one-star “Garbage” review that Sustenance once earned, this one had a little more nuance.

👉 Read more about Propensity 👈

Loved it! 😍

An unnerving story that begins with a bizarre experiment and unfolds into an impressive hyperbole for human hubris.

Synopsis

What if peace could be engineered?

In Propensity, a team of scientists and a military general pioneer a device capable of altering human behaviour itself—tuning aggression, obedience, libido, faith, and risk tolerance like dials on a console. At first, the results seem miraculous: violence quelled, conflict dissolved, impulses muted. But as the technology scales from labs to battlefields to cities, the illusion of control begins to fracture.

Through sharp, unsettling vignettes, the novel traces both the grand sweep of societal collapse and the intimate struggles of those left to navigate it. At its heart, Propensity is a literary exploration of power, morality, and the fragile myth of free will.

Both speculative and philosophical, it poses an unnerving question: if our choices can be rewritten at the neurochemical level, were they ever truly ours?

– Review Begins –

“Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated.”

This ominous word of caution is what Ridley Park’s speculative novel ‘Propensity’ opens with, and it sets a tone that strikes an impressive balance between clinically descriptive and quietly devastating. Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical intereference, it unfolds into an eerie metaphor for the tricky road between control and conscience.

Park’s chapters are short and succinct, some barely a page long, in a staccato rhythm. This creative choice, while initially a little unnerving, works well to reflect the story’s inherent disintegration: scientists losing grip on their own creation, subjects dissolving into numb submission or what they term “the zeroed state”, and a world slowly learning the price of their “engineered peace”. The writing comes off as crisp in an almost detached manner that leaves one wanting for a bit more emotional depth in the first part of the book but not only does that eventually grow on you, it ends up serving its purpose of thematic execution in both its text and subtext. Phrases like “silence playing dress-up as danger” and “peace was never meant to be built, only remembered” linger like faint echoes long after you turn the page.

This dogged curiosity and thought the writing dredges up anchor the novel’s core strength. Its impact is rooted not in prosaic preaching but letting the reader unpack the implications by themselves as they go on. Working in the field of medical physiology myself, the scientific nitty-gritty delved into, including the hormonal cues and neuronal plasticity, particularly intrigued me and while I acknowledge the convenience of fictitious extrapolation of theory, it manages to add a certain sense of realism to the story. It’s equally fascinating and disturbing, especially in the current epidemic of artifical intelligence we live in, to see faith and empathy become mere variables in a lab.

A fitting hyperbole of human’s hunger for order, ‘Propensity‘ does occasionally falter. Its fragmented and experimental structure, with prose interspersed with poems and memos, while successful in tying up its chaos, sometimes undercuts emotional engagement. The chapters are like snapshots that end before they can fully breathe. But when Park makes it work, especially through the poetic montage that follows the post-modulation disaster, it’s hypnotic.

By the end, I found myself returning to that elusive idea of peace conspicuous throughout the book. The text seems to suggest that peace isn’t something we construct but rather, something we remember. It’s almost a fragile illusion fleeting across one’s reality, often better suited to being a word than a sentiment, history than hope. It’s as if the moment you declare peaceful times, they’re already past.

‘Propensity’, thus, doesn’t offer answers; it offers questions and their ramifications. And in more ways than thought possible through the misconception surrounding the scope of speculative genre, that’s perhaps a truly accurate representation of the times we live in.

– Review Ends –

Why I appreciate this review

It would be easy to say I appreciate it because it’s positive. But that’s not the point.

One of my beta readers—someone I trust implicitly—had the opposite reaction. He loved the first half and thought the latter sections fell apart. This reviewer? The reverse. She found the disintegration satisfying. She saw design in the decay.

That tells me Propensity did what I intended: it divided readers by temperament. It rewards those who stay long enough to realise the structure mirrors the subject—the erosion of coherence itself. I never meant to write a tidy narrative. I meant to write an experiment in entropy.

If your literary diet leans on plot-driven fiction, my work might not taste familiar. I don’t spoon-feed answers. I leave questions open, sometimes maddeningly so. That’s deliberate.

An Anecdote

Years ago, my company ran a focus group for a software interface. Two groups saw the same prototype: one in their twenties, one in their fifties.

“It’s like a video game!”

Both said the same thing—“It’s like a video game.”
The twenty-somethings meant it as praise.
The fifty-somethings meant it as criticism.

Same words. Opposite meanings.

That’s literature too. Same text, different minds, different appetites. Some readers crave clarity and closure; others prefer complexity and dissonance. The trick is knowing which audience you’re writing for—and not apologising for it.

I write literary speculative fiction. It’s a small, peculiar corner of the bookshelf. But when someone wanders in and gets it, it’s enough.

Reaching the Finish Line with Zamyatin, Le Guin, and Foucault Still in My Head

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The book ends, as these things always do, with a sigh and a stack of annotated pages. I’ve just closed the cover on Zamyatin’s We, and, like a cigarette slipped into the afterword, there sat Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Stalin in the Soul“. She wrote it decades later in 1979, but it might as well have been stitched into the same binding. I may write about it in more detail elsewhere.

Zamyatin built the totalitarian city of glass; Le Guin peered into the reflective surfaces. Her “Stalin” isn’t a political leader but the minor tyrant most of us cultivate internally — the censor who edits desire into silence, who rewards obedience with the narcotic of safety. She understood what Foucault would later codify as biopower: that power’s finest trick is to outsource itself. You don’t need Rousseau’s chains when you can teach people to manage their own submission.

Reading it now feels almost indecently prescient. The State of We had surveillance towers; ours has dashboards. Zamyatin imagined a future where citizens surrendered privacy for perfection. We call it good UX. Le Guin warned that the artist’s real jailer was the fear of making art that doesn’t please the market. Foucault, if he were still here, would simply nod and mark it as another case study in voluntary servitude.

We‘s protagonist, D-503, had shades of Dostoyevsky’s in Notes from Underground – only a bit more reliable of a narrator.

As I close this run of readings — We and its prophetic essay appendage — I can’t shake the feeling that finishing the book is part of the ritual it describes: the quiet filing of experience, the discipline of comprehension. Yet finishing also matters. There’s a line between vigilance and paralysis, between watching the gears of power and daring to write anyway.

So yes, the project reaches its line — not a triumphant banner, more a hand-painted sign reading enough for now. Zamyatin showed me the machine. Le Guin showed me the human who keeps it running. Foucault, the analyst of our beautiful cages, taught me not to pretend there’s an outside.

All that remains is to write, while the internal commissar mutters and the cursor blinks like a surveillance light. That, apparently, is freedom.

The Wrong Dystopias: Why ‘We’ May Be the Book for Now

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2–3 minutes

Every time the news cycle coughs up another surveillance scandal, someone posts an Orwell meme. When pharmaceutical companies peddle happy pills, a Huxley meme pops up. 1984 and Brave New World have become the twin saints of dystopian shorthand, invoked as lazily as “Kafkaesque” or “Orwellian” whenever someone feels spooked by authority.

And yet, these two canonical nightmares don’t quite capture the mess we’re in. Our world is less Orwell’s boot stamping on a face, less Huxley’s soma lullaby, and more Zamyatin’s forgotten gem: We.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

NB: As my regular readers may know, I am an author and a philosopher. I decided to post this here – being about books – but from a philosophical perspective.

1984: The Boot and the Telescreen

Orwell’s vision of perpetual war, Newspeak, and state terror is always good for a scare. Yes, we have endless surveillance, but here’s the trick: nobody had to force us. We carry the telescreens in our pockets and call them iPhones. We gleefully sell our data for dopamine pellets disguised as “likes.” The Ministry of Truth hasn’t so much rewritten history as buried it under an avalanche of memes, cat videos, and outrage cycles. Orwell’s nightmare had to be imposed. Ours is volunteered.

Brave New World: The Soma Holiday

Huxley saw a culture distracted into oblivion – sex, drugs, and feelies. It resonates because the entertainment-industrial complex has outpaced even his imagination. We live in a time when attention spans collapse under TikTok’s weight, when “self-care” is code for medicated oblivion, and when consumption doubles as identity. But Huxley underestimated how much suffering we’d tolerate alongside our pleasures. His world was too tidy. Ours is messy: opioids meet social media, Prozac meets precarity.

We: The Transparent Cage

Here’s where Zamyatin earns his eerie prescience. Written in 1921, We imagines a society of glass walls, total transparency, and algorithmic order. People don’t need to be beaten into compliance; they celebrate their own reduction to predictable ciphers. Privacy is seen as deviance. Sound familiar? From fitness trackers to mood apps to your browsing history, we’re already busy quantifying ourselves into oblivion. Where Orwell needed torture and Huxley needed narcotics, Zamyatin needed only maths and consent.

Why We Now?

Because it shows the nightmare where people joyfully give themselves away. That’s not speculative fiction anymore; it’s our social contract with Big Tech, with influencer culture, with the dopamine economy. We don’t need Ministries or Somas when we’ve willingly built the glass house and handed over the keys.

So next time someone posts that Orwell vs Huxley meme, hand them Zamyatin. He may not have the brand recognition, but he has the sharper scalpel. And if you haven’t cracked We yet, do it soon – before it stops feeling like a novel and starts reading like user documentation.

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