Propensity (Hardcover)

Ridley Park

ISBN 10: 0971086982 / ISBN 13: 9780971086982

Published by Microglyphics, 2025

About this Item

Hardcover. 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 resurfaces: 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 peace could be engineered? In Propensity, a team of scientists and a military general pioneer a device capable of modulating human behaviour itself-tuning aggression, obedience, libido, faith, and risk tolerance. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780971086982

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Propensity (Hardcover)
• Publisher: Microglyphics
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971086982
• ISBN 13: 9780971086982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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 resurfaces: 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.

About the Author

Ridley Park is the fiction pseudonym of Bry Willis, an independent author and scholar whose work explores the boundaries of science, language, and control. His stories inhabit the space between speculative realism and moral philosophy, interrogating how systems-technological, linguistic, and social-shape the illusion of human freedom.