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?
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?
Consciousness is the parent of all horrors.
— Thomas Ligotti
Flesh slaps steel.
One baboon hurls itself against the gate, shrieking, the sound raw and metallic, reverberating off sterile walls. Foam clings to its canines. The other responds with equal fury, claws raking the floor, tail lashing in blind rage. Between them, the transparent barrier holds, vibrating with each impact but refusing to break.
Their eyes, bloodshot. Their breath comes in bursts. Every inch: muscle, tension, intent.
If the gate drops, they would not posture. They would not hesitate. They would kill.
Behind a reinforced pane of ballistic glass – polished, smudge-free, humming faintly with air recirculation – Dr V watches with the stillness of a statue. Only his pupils move, tracking the snarls, the slams, the spectacle of fury contained by architecture.
‘They’ve been at it for an hour,’ says Dr Noor Kaplan, arms crossed, voice hollow with caution. ‘If that barrier opens now, one of them doesn’t leave.’
Dr V’s gaze doesn’t blink.
‘It’s gone past dominance,’ he murmurs. ‘This is righteousness. Ritual. They’re locked in conviction.’
Kaplan tilts her head. ‘They’re baboons, doctor. They don’t have convictions.’
His lips move toward a smile but stop short. ‘Then what we’re about to give them is a mercy.’
He raises a finger.
At the console, the technician hesitates. Then presses the button.
A low-frequency tone pulses through the enclosure – too soft to register as sound, but deep enough to thrum in bone and breath, like standing beside a distant turbine. Simultaneously, the barrier begins to descend.
The instant the window touches the ground, the baboons freeze.
No sound. No motion. Just the shallow rise and fall of two torsos twitching in chemical confusion.
One tilts its head. The other blinks. No growl. No lunge.
They step forward slowly, uncertainly – two shadows closing a void. Then one extends a hand. Gently, it plucks at the other’s fur, searching for nothing in particular. Grooming.
The room behind the glass exhales all at once.
Kaplan’s voice comes low: ‘Jesus Christ.’
Dr V says nothing at first. He’s transfixed.
‘It’s peace,’ he whispers at last. ‘Synthetic, yes. But peace nonetheless.’
Kaplan doesn’t take her eyes off the animals. ‘You know what this reminds me of?’
He glances at her. She doesn’t look away from the glass.
‘The silence before a species disappears.’
The baboons continue their pantomime of affection. One nibbles gently at the other’s shoulder.
Kaplan’s voice softens, almost speculative. ‘Imagine if we could control the world with this…’
The Doctor doesn’t answer. But something behind his eyes shifts – less revelation than recognition.
Dr V’s silence isn’t refusal.
It’s agreement.
The glass clears to a dim reflection – just Dr V’s face now, superimposed over the image of two baboons grooming like monks in a trance. He stays long after the others had filed out. Kaplan offers a glance, half concern, half resignation.
She opens her mouth, then closes it.
Not the time.
The animals, once frenzied with violence, now moved with a mechanical gentleness – as if remembering a ritual they never learned. One paws lazily at the other’s arm. The noise, the violence, the urgency – it’s all gone. In its place: a fragile choreography of gentleness.
Dr V places his palm flat against the glass. A gesture without audience. Without purpose, even. Just the need to feel something real between him and the thing they’d made. The warmth of the barrier doesn’t surprise him. The enclosure, like everything else in this facility, was calibrated – temperate, sterile, and indifferent to miracles.
This is what peace looks like, he thinks. Engineered peace. Not chosen. Not earned. Just... implemented.
He pulls his hand away and turns toward the corridor. He knows what comes next.
“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.