DreadEnginePress

Mandate

We publish hard speculative fiction — and we build the sovereign infrastructure to publish it. Cosmic horror as forensic accounting. Science fiction as field journal. Tools that respect the work.

Our books are written by builders. The kind of people who have welded, machined, and watched things break. They know how the system fails because they have spent their lives trying to keep similar systems running.

Our tools are built the same way. We run them on our own books before we ship them to anyone else. The first — Archive Custodian — is in development now, running live on The Conceptual Predator.

And we publish under one diagnostic. There is a predator. Not metaphorically — structurally. It is what makes you tired in ways you cannot account for. It is what ate MakerExpo, what ate your 401k, what eats the attention you tried to spend on something that mattered. Naming it is the work. That is what this press is for.

From the Founder

Ravi Baboolal

Founder · DreadEnginePress

Cambridge, Ontario

I have been building fighting robots since I was thirteen. I designed the autonomous robots that clean the floor in your local Walmart. I cast components for nuclear plants before that.

I started this press because I wanted to read science fiction written by someone who has watched mechanical systems fail under load — and there isn’t very much of it in English. Liu Cixin worked at a power plant for twenty years. Watts is a biologist. The slot for the working engineer is mostly empty.

I write under one rule: did the author do the work? If the answer is no, you can feel it on the page. I am trying to write the kind of science fiction where the answer is yes.

The book I have for you is The Conceptual Predator. It’s the forensic audit log of an alien investigator who lands on Earth, finds a population at predator-grade cortisol levels, and slowly identifies the predator as something nobody has a name for yet. I call it the predator. So does the book. So does the paper that supports it. So, I hope, will you.

Read the full story →

On Press

Launch Day

19

July

2026

The Conceptual Predator · Book One

Print release & signing.

The trade paperback releases July 19, 2026 in tandem with a Kindle & Kindle Unlimited launch. Ravi Baboolal will be signing copies in person at the Indigo local-author event at Cambridge Centre.

Indigo Cambridge Centre · local-author signing · July 19, 2026

Kindle & Kindle Unlimited · live at launch

Trade paperback · available at the event

Pre-order on Amazon Book Website

Catalogue

Book One

The Conceptual Predator

Ravi Baboolal

The Conceptual Predator

The Accumulativis Cycle · Book One

by Ravi Baboolal

You are tired because you are being hunted. There is no predator on any sensor.

Three alien auditors arrive at Earth on a routine survey. Forty-eight hours in, they file their first anomaly: ninety-two percent of the human population shows the cortisol levels of prey being actively hunted. There is no creature on any sensor.

What they find is not a virus, not a cult, not a machine intelligence. It is a logic. And it is preparing to molt.

A first-contact story told from the wrong side of the encounter. Cosmic horror as economic thriller. For readers of Tchaikovsky, Watts, Liu, and qntm.

~100,000 words 47 LOG chapters Trade paperback 5.5″ × 8.5″ ~370 pages $24.99 CAD · $19.99 USD July 19, 2026

Pre-order on Amazon Book Website Read on Royal Road

Companion Materials

AGS-001 — Antimemetic Dossier Signal Decay — Newsletter

Companion Paper Web · EPUB CC BY 4.0

Stigmergic Predation

An Endogenous Great Filter Hypothesis

by Ravi Baboolal

The factual scaffold beneath The Conceptual Predator: a long-form argument that a civilization’s own coordination substrate can become its apex predator. Read it as the theory, or as the spoiler-free way in to the novel.

The EPUB is free. Join Signal Decay — the press dispatch — and we’ll send it to your inbox, along with launch news for the novels.

Free EPUB

Get the EPUB — Join Signal Decay Read Free on the Web

Workshop

In Development

DEP · Tool 01

Archive Custodian

An AI-powered chatbot for working authors. Train it on your manuscript and series notes. Deploy it on your website. Let your readers ask questions about your books without their queries training somebody else's model.

Custodian runs on local inference — the same stack that powers ARGUS, the in-universe AI on The Conceptual Predator’s book site. We’re building it on our own books first. When it’s ready for other authors, we’ll open the waitlist.

Project Status Notify me on launch

Forthcoming

In production · 2026–2028

The Null Point

The Accumulativis Cycle · A series of standalones

A Saskatchewan rancher notices the survey drones over his land have stopped moving. His daughter leaves for engineering school in six weeks. By the time he understands what is being measured, the measurement is complete.

A sequence of novellas set on the ground during the events of The Conceptual Predator — the predator arriving not as an invasion but as a notice of eminent domain, an algorithmic price, a tractor that locks its own firmware. One family. One aquifer. The last generation that believed the old defences worked, and the first that understands the new shape of the threat.

Self-contained entries, readable in any order, releasing through 2027–2028.

In production · 2027

The Kinetic Exile

The Accumulativis Cycle · Book Two

Three hundred years after the quarantine, one ship still runs dark across the cold rim of the system. The bill always comes due. The Kin decide how it is paid.

The Dismal Science carries the last free humans — transformed by centuries of siege into a people who fight with momentum and hate, who fund survival through the Audit, where a crew member offers their own future as collateral against the next shot. They are what humanity becomes when you remove the Earth, the markets, and the Tether, and leave only a closed hull and a hungry void.

The direct sequel to The Conceptual Predator. Free humanity, three centuries on.

About the Press

DreadEnginePress is an independent Canadian press founded in 2026 by Ravi Baboolal — a working mechatronics engineer who has built fighting robots since he was thirteen, designed the autonomous floor robots deployed across North American retail, and cast components destined for nuclear plants. The press exists to ship the science fiction those hands produce, and the essays that diagnose what the fiction is about.

The full backstory is on the About the Author page. The short version: we publish hard speculative fiction at the intersection of mechanical systems and cosmic horror, we name what we are pointing at, and we run on hardware we own.

We are not currently open to outside book submissions. Archive Custodian, our forthcoming author tool, will open a notify list as launch approaches.

Founded: 2026
Founder: Ravi Baboolal
Location: Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
Catalogue: The Conceptual Predator (2026); Stigmergic Predation (paper)
Forthcoming: The Null Point (novellas); The Kinetic Exile (2027)
Tools: Archive Custodian (in development)
Genres: Hard science fiction; Cosmic horror; Economic thriller
Submissions: Books: closed; Tools: pre-launch

Contact

Press & Inquiries

[email protected]

For review copies, interviews, or library acquisitions. Please allow 3-5 business days for a response.

Archive Custodian

[email protected]

For Sovereign-tier inquiries, deployment questions, or technical support.