Tag: speculative fiction

Sustenance Novella free on Kindle

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On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my Ridley Park 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.)

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2

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

Why a Free Copy of Sustenance?

I made this Kindle version available for free to get some reviews. This promotion is all or nothing, so take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave a review, please do.

Midjourney Boundaries

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I promise that this will not become a hub for generative AI. Rather than return to editing, I wanted to test more of Midjourney’s boundaries.

It turns out that Midjourney is selective about the nudity it renders. I was denied a render because of cleavage, but full-on topless – no problem.

Both of these videos originate from the same source image, but they take different paths. There is no accompanying video content. The setup features three women in the frame with a mechanical arm. I didn’t prompt for it. I’m not even sure of its intent. It’s just there, shadowing the women nearest to it. I don’t recall prompting for the oversized redhead in the foreground, though I may have.

In both images, note the aliasing of the tattoos on the blonde, especially on her back. Also, notice that her right arm seems shorter than it should. Her movements are jerky, as if rendered in a video game. I’m not sure what ritual the two background characters are performing, but notice in each case the prepetition. This seems to be a general feature of generative AI. It gets itself in loops, almost autistic.

Notice a few things about the top render.

Video: Midjourney render of 3 females and a mechanical arm engaging in a ritual. (9 seconds)

The first video may represent an interrogation. The blonde woman on the left appears to be a bit disoriented, but she is visually tracking the woman on the right. She seems to be saying something. Notice when the woman on the right stands. Her right foot lands unnaturally. She rather glitches.

The camera’s push and pull, and then push, seems to be an odd directorial choice, but who am I to say?

Video: Midjourney render of 3 females and a mechanical arm engaging in a ritual. (12 seconds)

The second video may represent taunting. The woman on the left still appears to be a bit disoriented, but she checks the redhead in the foreground with a glance. Notice the rocking of the two background characters, as well as the mech arm, which sways in sync with the woman on the right. This is a repetition glitch I mentioned above.

Here, the camera seems to have a syncopated relationship with the characters’ sway.

Summary

The stationary objects are well-rendered and persistent.

Assignment

Draft a short story or flash fiction using this as an inspirational prompt. I’m trying to imagine the interactions.

  • The ginger seems catatonic or drugged. Is she a CIS-female? What’s with her getup?
  • The blonde seems only slightly less out of it. Did she arrive this way? Did they dress her? Why does she appear to still have a weapon on her back? Is it a weapon or a fetter? Why is she dressed like that? Is she a gladiatrix readying for a contest? Perhaps she’s in training. What is she saying? Who is she talking to? What is her relationship to the redhead? Are they friends or foes – or just caught up in the same web?
  • What is the woman wearing the helmet doing? She appears to have the upper hand. Is she a cyborg, or is she just wearing fancy boots? What’s with her outfit? What’s with her Tycho Brahe prosthetic nose piece?
  • What is that mechanical hand? Is it a guard? A restraint? Is it hypnotising the ginger? Both of them? Is it conducting music that’s not audible?
  • What’s it read on the back wall? The two clips don’t share the same text. Call the continuity people.

Ridley Park Propensity

Posted in agency, fiction, free will, identity, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
frantic woman, pen and ink

As some of you know, I publish speculative fiction under the name Ridley Park. Propensity is one of several recent releases – a novella that leans philosophical, brushes up against literary fiction, and steps quietly into the margins of sci-fi.

It’s not about spaceships or superintelligence. It’s about modulation.

About peace engineered through neurochemical compliance.

About the slow horror of obedience without belief, and the behavioural architecture that lets us think we’re still in control.

The ideas explored include:

  • Free will as illusion
  • Peace as compliance
  • Drift, echo, and the limits of modulation
  • Obedience without belief
  • Institutional horror and soft dystopia
  • Consent and behavioural control
  • Narrative as residue
  • Collapse by calibration

Though filed under speculative fiction, Propensity [US] is best read as a literary artefact – anti-sci-fi, in a sense. There’s no fetishisation of technology or progress. Just modulation, consequence, and the absence of noise.

This PDF contains selected visual excerpts from the physical book to accompany the free audiobook edition. For readers and listeners alike, it offers a glimpse into Ridley Park’s world – a quietly dystopian, clinically unsettling, and depressingly plausible one.

  • Title page
  • Copyrights page
  • Table of Contents
  • Chapter 10: Memorandum. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of a memo.
  • Chapter 26: Simulacra. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a screenplay.
  • Chapter 28: Standard Test: This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a standardised test.
  • Chapter 34: Calendar. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the format of a calendar.
  • Chapter 39: Carnage. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of a Dr Suess-type poem.
  • Chapter 41: Leviathan. This chapter is excerpted in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered with an image of the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan and redacted page content.
  • Chapter 42: Ashes to Ashes. This chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of text art.
  • Chapter 43: Unknown. A description of this chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of an ink sketch.
  • Chapter 44: Vestige. A description of this chapter is read in the audiobook. The inclusion here is for visualisation as it is rendered in the form of text art.

Ridley Park Propensity Audiobook InsertsDownload

For more information about Ridley Park’s Propensity, visit the website. I’ll be sharing content related to Propensity and my other publications. I’ll cross-post here when the material has a philosophical bent, which it almost always does.

Sustenance: A Book About Aliens, Language, and Everything You’re Getting Wrong

Posted in morality, nature, perception, philosophy, podcast, property, psychology, society, technologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Violet aliens on a farm

So, I wrote a book and published it under Ridley Park, the pseudonym I use for fiction.

It has aliens. But don’t get excited—they’re not here to save us, probe us, or blow up the White House. They’re not even here for us.

Which is, frankly, the point.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The book’s called Sustenance, and while it’s technically speculative fiction, it’s more about us than them. Or rather, it’s about how we can’t stop making everything about us—even when it shouldn’t be. Especially when it shouldn’t be.

Let’s talk themes. And yes, we’re using that word like academics do: as a smokescreen for saying uncomfortable things abstractly.

Language: The Original Scam

Language is the ultimate colonial tool. We call it communication, but it’s mostly projection. You speak. You hope. You assume. You superimpose meaning on other people like a cling film of your own ego.

Sustenance leans into this—not by showing a breakdown of communication, but by showing what happens when communication was never mutual in the first place. When the very idea of “meaning” has no purchase. It’s not about mishearing—it’s about misbeing.

Culture: A Meme You Were Born Into

Culture is the software you didn’t choose to install, and probably can’t uninstall. Most people treat it like a universal law—until they meet someone running a different OS. Cue confusion, arrogance, or violence.

The book explores what happens when cultural norms aren’t shared, and worse, aren’t even legible. Imagine trying to enforce property rights on beings who don’t understand “ownership.” It’s like trying to baptise a toaster.

Sex/Gender: You Keep Using Those Words…

One of the quiet joys of writing non-human characters is discarding human assumptions about sex and gender—and watching readers squirm.

What if sex wasn’t about power, pleasure, or identity? What if it was just a biological procedure, like cell division or pruning roses? Would you still be interested? Would you still moralise about it?

We love to believe our sex/gender constructs are inevitable. They’re not. They’re habits—often bad ones.

Consent: Your Framework Is Showing

Consent, as we use it, assumes mutual understanding, shared stakes, and equivalent agency. Remove any one of those and what’s left?

Sustenance doesn’t try to solve this—it just shows what happens when those assumptions fall apart. Spoiler: it’s not pretty, but it is honest.

Projection: The Mirror That Lies

Humans are deeply committed to anthropocentrism. If it walks like us, or flinches like us, it must be us. This is why we get so disoriented when faced with the truly alien: it won’t dance to our tune, and we’re left staring at ourselves in the funhouse mirror.

This isn’t a book about aliens.

It’s a book about the ways we refuse to see what’s not us.

Memory: The Autobiography of Your Justifications

Memory is not a record. It’s a defence attorney with a narrative license. We rewrite the past to make ourselves look consistent, or innocent, or right.

In Sustenance, memory acts less as a tether to truth and more as a sculpting tool—a way to carve guilt into something manageable. Something you can live with. Until you can’t.

In Summary: It’s Not About Them. It’s About You.

If that sounds bleak, good. It’s meant to.

But it’s also a warning: don’t get too comfortable in your own categories. They’re only universal until you meet someone who doesn’t share them.

Like I said, it’s not really about the aliens.

It’s about us.

If you enjoy fiction that’s more unsettling than escapist, more question than answer, you might be interested in Sustenance. It’s live on Kindle now for the cost of a regrettable coffee:

📘 Sustenance on Amazon US
Also available in the UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, JP, BR, CA, MX, AU, and IN—because alienation is a universal language.