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Propensity
What if behavioural control worked too well?
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening – of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question What does it mean to behave?
Propensity is a speculative novella from Ridley Park, author of Hemo Sapiens and Sustenance. Known for fiction that slips through institutional cracks and ethical ambiguity, Park returns with a chilling vision of artificial peace and cognitive collapse.
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse — for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
What if behavioural control worked too well?No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question What does it mean to behave?
Propensity is a speculative novella from Ridley Park, author of Hemo Sapiens and Sustenance. Known for fiction that slips through institutional cracks and ethical ambiguity, Park returns with a chilling vision of artificial peace and cognitive collapse.
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Ｅｄｉｔｏｒｉａｌ Ｎｏｔｅ"Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated."
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity 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 that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its "engineered peace." 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.
—Reedsy Discovery Review
No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening – of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question What does it mean to behave?
Propensity is a speculative novella from Ridley Park, author of Hemo Sapiens and Sustenance. Known for fiction that slips through institutional cracks and ethical ambiguity, Park returns with a chilling vision of artificial peace and cognitive collapse.
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse — for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
What if behavioural control worked too well?No riots. No rebellion. Just a flattening—of desire, of ambition, of will. Across homes, schools, and governments, people stop acting like themselves. Some forget how. Others forget why.
The system wasn’t designed to stay on this long. But now there’s no off switch. And the researchers who built it? Most of them are zeroed.
As one child begins to drift from baseline, an impossible question What does it mean to behave?
Propensity is a speculative novella from Ridley Park, author of Hemo Sapiens and Sustenance. Known for fiction that slips through institutional cracks and ethical ambiguity, Park returns with a chilling vision of artificial peace and cognitive collapse.
This is a psychological dystopia without explosions, a story where silence spreads faster than violence, where systems behave better than the people inside them.
A tale of modulation, inertia, and the slow unravelling of human impulse—for readers who prefer their dystopias quiet and their horrors deeply plausible.
Ｅｄｉｔｏｒｉａｌ Ｎｏｔｅ"Reader discretion is advised. Free will has been deprecated."
Beginning as a bizarre experiment in behavioural modulation by way of neurochemical interference, Propensity 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 that mirrors the story’s disintegration—scientists losing grip on their creation and a world learning the price of its "engineered peace." 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.
—Reedsy Discovery Review
240 pages, Hardcover
Published May 24, 2025
5 people want to read
About the author
Ridley Park
5 books2 followersRidley Park writes speculative fiction with one eye on imagined futures and ‟what if” scenarios that hold a mirror to our shifting society.
Lurking at the fringes where technology merges with mythology, Park’s stories explore bioethics, belonging and what it means to be human
through the lens of outsider characters who expose inconvenient truths.
By teasing the boundaries of accepted possibility and normality then tearing wide open the accompanying fears, prejudices and politics, Park aims to trouble consensus reality enough to change hearts, open minds and advance collective wisdom.
Lurking at the fringes where technology merges with mythology, Park’s stories explore bioethics, belonging and what it means to be human
through the lens of outsider characters who expose inconvenient truths.
By teasing the boundaries of accepted possibility and normality then tearing wide open the accompanying fears, prejudices and politics, Park aims to trouble consensus reality enough to change hearts, open minds and advance collective wisdom.
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