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 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.
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
