The Probabilities of Meaning

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Simone Ridgeway’s No Ordinary Future wins the 2026 University of South London (USL) Prize

Born in Hampshire and now living in Glasgow, this is her debut work. As the first winner of its kind, No Ordinary Future builds upon the world established by children’s author David Wainwright in The Ordinal (1994). It was published sequentially on the author’s own Substack, and exists in parallel to Wainwright’s own sequel, Ordina Obscura (2024).

No Ordinary Future continues the tale of Pascale, five years on from the events of The Ordinal, in which the teenage maths prodigy overthrows the Ordinal regime, after it captures her father and she discovers that she has inadvertently supported their weaponising of time travel. In Ridgeway’s follow up, Pascale must find a way to navigate this status and find a place in a world in which the suffering of others feels inherent, structural and overwhelming.

Blessing Okafor, Chair of Judges and Programme Director of Creative Writing said, “in the first year the competition has permitted digital-first fiction, Ridgeway’s work offers a perfect exemplification of the novel’s evolution in today’s society, as well as providing a bold and mature exploration as to how to assess and navigate one’s own power in society. It disrupts the form and forces us to confront our own agency, whilst clearly being a much longed-for vision of the Ordinal world - evident by its stratospheric rise within the world of fan-authored fiction. It helps us all look to a brighter future.”

Simone Ridgeway accepted the £10,000 prize at a ceremony at Foyles in central London, saying, “I wrote No Ordinary Future for my daughter and posted it on the off chance that others might enjoy it. I never dreamed of recognition on this scale. Thank you so much to all those who read the Substack, the USL Prize judges, and of course to David Wainwright, who created this incredible landscape and characters who defined a generation.”

Now in its twentieth year, the USL Prize was launched in 2006 with the aim of celebrating those breaking new ground in literary fiction from the UK and Ireland.

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From: sarah@groundskeeper.org.uk

To: s.ridgeway86@gmail.com

Sent by Groundskeeper Publishing on behalf of David Wainwright

Dear Simone,

Forgive the rather indirect delivery method - I may be approaching seventy, but I am not some fuddy-duddy who can’t log into his own email! I simply thought best to stick to the approved channels as things stand.

I understand that the USL Prize comes as something of an unexpected honour to you. I myself know what an enormous difference this type of recognition can make to one’s life when one has set designs on such a course - but to receive it as an unexpected and unintended consequence of one’s own talents must be quite a personal triumph.

For No Ordinary Future, I find myself reaching around unsuccessfully for an appropriate noun and coming up short. A novel? A book? Your tale, I shall say, defies the odds on many counts. Innovative though the USL Prize is, I don’t think I would have believed someone who told me that this year’s would go to a piece of sequentially published YA fan-fiction, let alone one which builds on foundations I had cemented.

I would not be so arrogant as to assume you are aware of my position on fan-fiction. I might describe myself as a post-intentionalist - it is a joy to me that others take pleasure and find meaning in my work, and prudent authors since Chaucer onwards have well known that once in the wider world, their work takes on lives of its own. I do not gatekeep Pascale and her world; she lives in her readers. To consider an alternative pathway for her which holds equal legitimacy to that which I created is, to me, a fascinating literary endeavour. (Would that my own sequel had achieved such great heights!)

This is all to say that I offer you my sincerest congratulations on a piece that is so extraordinarily popular, and now also celebrated as a work of literature.

Yours,

David

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From: s.ridgeway86@gmail.com

To: sarah@groundskeeper.org.uk

FAO David Wainwright

Dear David,

After everything that’s happened over the last year I shouldn’t admit I was surprised to hear from you, but somehow I still found myself sat there, finger shaking, unable to tap open your message. My husband - not a philosopher - says that if the saying goes ‘I think, therefore I am’, then I exist in ultra high-definition. I’m an overthinker (and perhaps an overspeaker) and before I opened your message I’d already heard all the things you hadn’t said.

Thank you for writing. You might think, based on my complete lack of communication with you, that I haven’t considered you, and your part to play in all of this - but I have, and it does matter to me. In a great sense I’m relieved and genuinely glad that my extension of Pascale’s story is one in which you find joy - although I wasn’t sure from your message whether you had read it. Perhaps you were just saying you liked the principle of my story’s existence.

Common sense says that as someone who has benefitted from something you invented, I should put my cards on the table. So I should admit this: though I’m grateful for your response, I do struggle with it. I’ll share with you the real reason as to why I wrote my No Ordinary Future, beyond the version I’ve given to journalists.

I was a child who tore through the library summer reading challenge in a week. That said, I was also a child who didn’t get on with many children’s books. Goosebumps was cheap thrills, Baby-Sitters Club couldn’t even hold on to their most bearable member (Stacey), and Roald Dahl left a bitter taste in the mouth, like the mouse-infested sweet jar in Boy.

My bedroom was the smallest room, tucked under a slanting ceiling so high I might have been a nesting pigeon. It was there, at ten years old, that I read The Ordinal. It was there that I began Pascale’s journey with her, too, in that small, shadowy room with her father, bonding over reckoning the numbers, unaware of what readers of the blurb knew - that those figures brought the reckoning to her.

Yes, I read your book at a formative age. But that’s not the whole story. At every stage of my life, The Ordinal has given me something that I have longed for.

Look, I never imagined I was Pascale. I couldn’t do a simultaneous equation today, let alone calculate the distance of the stars at thirteen. But even though she may be exceptional, her power sits within the bounds of what a young person can do.

She must be taken seriously. Her father took her seriously when he tutored her secretly against the rules of his Ordinal captors, and The Ordinal must take her seriously when they realise it is her work powering The Projection. And when you chose The Projection to depict probability instead of prophecy, you took your young readers seriously. You presented us with the problem of the unstable present and future, and said: I know you’ll get this.

Returning to your book as an adult, I realised that it helped my understanding of the world more than any “gritty” stories in mundane verité. They’re usually fairy tales in disguise. Pascale is flawed. She has to face the consequences of what she has unknowingly done, and find a way to live on. She felt human.

I watched the people of your fiction look into the projections of the future and use their weak or credulous understanding of it to harm; to run in fear. You painted, in beautiful landscapes of light flickering with possibility, immense vistas, the imagined embrace of a missing father - the complex and changeable nature not only of people, but the future. I couldn’t have voiced this as a child but your story gave me a way to understand that my interpretations mattered and were the key to a hopeful existence.

My now husband and I arranged our first meeting at Spider’s Web Bridge, imagining ourselves beneath those shimmering cables at the moment Pascale understands why her father involved her in this danger at all. When our daughter was born in 2021, there was never any doubt about her name. We are careful to tell her, and will continue to tell her, that she is not Pascale. For me, the name Pascale speaks to a way of being in the world: hope without naivety.

The Ordinal has been lauded and awarded, I know, but to say it plainly, I believe that it is the greatest piece of children’s literature ever written.

I also believe that you owe your readers nothing. Please bear that thought in mind as I write what I write next.

When I heard about the planned publication of Ordina Obscura, of course I was excited - and nervous.

Pascale overthrew The Ordinal regime. Yet in Ordina Obscura, it was back - as if nothing had happened. She lived in an unchanged society, repressed in the same way. The Ordinal felt written out of history. I get it: you’re exploring how control is reconstructed. But this throws the focus onto them, and I wanted what she’d done to matter.

At this point, my own Pascale was two. She began to run, to piece words into the smallest of sentences, and become someone more recognisably her. Perhaps without her on the scene I would have finished Ordina Obscura and put it back on the shelf. Moaned a bit to my husband. Sought out a Goodreads review which agreed with me.

But I grieved the hope I’d taken from The Ordinal. So I decided to write.

If you’ve read No Ordinary Future then you’ll know this already. Pascale is eighteen, as in your sequel, but the world is entirely changed. She isn’t forgotten. She understands that she lives in a world which is unjust, where suffering seems inherent - suffering she has caused. The antagonists are structural. In The Ordinal she had to come to terms with her actions; in No Ordinary Future she turns coming to terms into action. I wanted to show my Pascale - the little, embodied one, standing before me and echoing back every word I spoke - that the story can be rewritten. In her darkest moments, when she longs for something better, I hope she remembers this.

Your description of my work as a “fascinating literary exercise” is not inaccurate. It is an interpretation, and I would also describe myself as post-intentionalist. Maybe it’s old fashioned to revive “the author”, who has supposedly, conceptually, been dead for decades. But theory can be a knife to the throat of embodied experience. The kind of experience that has a place in time and sensation.

You call my story “an alternative pathway for her which holds equal status to the one I created”. I hear the generosity, but also the imbalance. You are canon. She is your intellectual property. You are her creator. I am grateful, and the fact of that gratitude tells its own story.

You may regret having written a simple note of congratulations(!) I am glad you did.

With best wishes,

Simone

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From: davidkwainwright@yahoo.com

To: s.ridgeway86@gmail.com

Dear Simone,

Thank you for writing to me with such care and openness. Of course, I don’t wish to trivialise your work, nor do I doubt the seriousness with which you have approached it. I am ever mindful and incredibly touched by the personal significance The Ordinal holds for you and genuinely moved by your remembrances of it.

Please don’t take this in a bad spirit, but in some sense I am glad that I disappointed you. It is a wonderful gift for your daughter.

You are right; I have privileges that I didn’t acknowledge. As you well know, my stories focus on the overcoming of structures. I do attempt not to perpetuate them, sometimes with less success.

In the spirit of candour, perhaps I should admit something you might have detected in my first message. That the USL Prize should have gone so out of their way to elevate your work, without Ordina Obscura receiving similar attention, did sting - dare I suggest that controversy has always been a generous paymaster? That said, I would be dishonest if I did not admit that your work had already found a substantial readership on its own terms, and that fact gives me pause. There is something there that cannot simply be dismissed as provocation.

I must also challenge your implication that as the owner of the IP, I am the all-powerful. We both know the conversations about licensing are afoot, and were I to shut these down, that No Ordinary Future would emerge by some ways or means. Control, as it is, always has its limits.

All the best,

David

* * *

From: s.ridgeway86@gmail.com

To: davidkwainwright@yahoo.com

Dear David,

Your response is careful and considerate, which in this day and age can be rare, and though I would expect nothing less of you, I appreciate it all the more.

The success of No Ordinary Future has unsettled me more than I expected. At times I feel I have spoken effectively to something shared. At others, I worry that I have simply said the thing people were ready to hear, and benefited from the timing. I find myself wondering whether Ordina Obscura is, in its refusal to offer that comfort, the more difficult and therefore the more courageous book.

You can see I’m struggling with the idea of taking myself “seriously”. It has crossed my mind already that perhaps I am being used opportunistically: an institution makes a bold move in the name of literature, sets light to the establishment, and delights in the clicks and the eyeballs. I am assured by the USL Prize team that this is not the case. As if a bunch of creative writers couldn’t easily tailor their message to an audience of one.

We both relinquish ownership of meaning, but it strikes me that we both care deeply and personally about something we claim to have set free. Sure, my story hasn’t upset you, but where might the line be? Is there a version of her which might prompt you to step in?

Whatever else is true, we are where these questions land. We live and breathe, in the same timeline. What a great honour this is. And what loquacious, hypocritical projectionists we would be if we didn’t embrace the challenge of working through it.

We began with words and with ideas. Perhaps we should learn to interpret these shimmering, flickering projections of the future, in a more tangible way. A place in time. Two glasses of Merlot. What do you say?

With best wishes,

Simone

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