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. If the infrastructure is good enough for The Conceptual Predator, it is good enough for yours.

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.

97,947 words 45 logs Trade Paperback & Ebook July 19, 2026

Visit the Book Read on Royal Road

Workshop

$ argus.status

> running

> local inference

> cloud calls: 0

$ argus.query

> "who is zyd?"

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argus@dep:~ █

DEP · Tool 01

Archive Custodian

An AI-powered chatbot for working authors. Train it on your manuscript, your worldbuilding bible, your series notes. Deploy it on your website. Let your readers ask questions about your books without any of the answers training somebody else's model.

Archive Custodian runs on local inference. Your manuscript never leaves the hardware it lives on. No OpenAI, no Anthropic, no Google — no cloud AI provider sees a single page of your work. The same stack that runs ARGUS for our flagship novel, productized for any working author who needs the same thing.

Signal

$12 /mo

Gemma 4 E2B
1 book
5k queries

Broadcast

$29 /mo

Gemma 4 E4B
3 books
10k queries

Sovereign

$79 /mo

7B model
Series support
Unlimited

Visit Archive Custodian Enquire

Forthcoming

In production · 2027

The Kinetic Exile

The Accumulativis Cycle · Book Two

One ship made it out. The Dismal Science — a research vessel carrying humanity’s last working gravity manipulation array, the only technology Host C cannot reproduce on its own.

Three hundred years of siege follow. The Kin run dark across the cold rim of the system, hunted by the swarming Host B fleet that the Predator built to bring them home. They survive on a sealed ecosystem of extreme scarcity, evolving in the dark, becoming something humanity was never meant to be.

By the time they breach Federation space, they are not the species the Aethel left behind. They are what humanity becomes when you remove the Earth, the markets, the Tether — and replace them with a closed hull, a hungry void, and a predator that will not stop.

Book Two of the Accumulativis Cycle is the story of free humanity, transformed.

About the Press

DreadEnginePress is an independent Canadian press founded in 2026 by Ravi Baboolal — robotics engineer, machinist, Battlebots veteran, and lifelong Dungeon Master.

The press operates from Waterloo, Ontario. We publish hard speculative fiction at the intersection of mechanical systems and cosmic horror, and we build the sovereign infrastructure to publish it — tools that respect the work, run on hardware we own, and never train somebody else's model on someone else's manuscript.

We are not currently open to outside book submissions. The press exists, for now, to publish the work of its founder. Archive Custodian is open to all working authors.

Founded: 2026
Founder: Ravi Baboolal
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Books: 1 title (1 forthcoming)
Tools: Archive Custodian
Genres: Cosmic horror; Hard science fiction; First contact
Submissions: Books: closed; Tools: open

Contact

Press & Inquiries

hello@dreadenginepress.ca

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

Archive Custodian

custodian@dreadenginepress.ca

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