Paul Riddell is not the easiest person to fit into a tidy biographical box. “Writer” works, but it leaves out the carnivorous plants. “Former plant-gallery owner” is accurate, but it ignores decades of science fiction commentary, cultural criticism, technical writing, and gleefully strange storytelling. “Dallas eccentric” gets closer, although it sounds suspiciously like an award presented at a banquet involving barbecue sauce and a malfunctioning fog machine.
This profile focuses on Paul T. Riddell, the Dallas-based writer associated with science fiction essays, the former Texas Triffid Ranch, and The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College. His career demonstrates what can happen when speculative fiction, scientific curiosity, horticulture, regional culture, and a very dry sense of humor are permitted to share the same laboratory without adult supervision.
Who Is Paul Riddell?
Paul Riddell is an American writer whose published work has ranged across science fiction criticism, essays, reviews, satire, paleontology, internet commentary, and fictional worldbuilding. He is also known for creating the Texas Triffid Ranch, a North Texas gallery devoted to carnivorous and unusual plants.
His professional path has been anything but linear. He worked in the technology and defense-industry environment of North Texas, became active in magazine and alternative publishing, withdrew from professional writing for a period, developed an intense interest in carnivorous plants, operated a public gallery, and eventually returned to regular creative work through the St. Remedius project. That is not a conventional résumé. It is more like a résumé that escaped, ate three flies, and started its own newsletter.
Riddell has described his primary professional writing period as running from 1989 to 2002, an era when magazines, alternative newspapers, fanzines, and early online publications offered numerous outlets for specialized and unconventional voices. Contemporary convention records and bibliographic databases document his work in science fiction journalism and criticism during the 1990s.
Paul Riddell’s Early Writing Career
Science Fiction, Paleontology, and Sharp Commentary
During the 1990s, Riddell built a reputation as an essayist who approached science fiction culture with both affection and a sharpened instrument. His work was informed by genre history, scientific interests, fan conventions, publishing economics, and the peculiar behavior of people who can debate fictional spacecraft specifications for six hours but forget where they parked.
A Readercon program from the period identified him as the author of Squashed Armadillocon or Fear and Loathing in Austin: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the Fanboy Dream. It also credited him with the paleontology column “Scleral Rings” for Science Fiction Eye and the column “Alive in Dallas” for Proud Flesh. His writing appeared in or was associated with publications such as Cinefantastique, Skeptical Inquirer, Film Threat Video Guide, and The Annals of Improbable Research.
These credits reveal the range of his interests. He was not simply reviewing books or summarizing television episodes. He was examining the communities, industries, scientific claims, and social rituals surrounding speculative fiction. His writing frequently treated fandom as both a genuine cultural force and a marvelous source of human absurdity.
A Voice Built for the Independent Press
Riddell’s strongest work emerged during a period when independent publications could be personal, combative, experimental, and proudly uninterested in sounding like corporate brochures. His essays often carried the energy of a conversation held after midnight at a convention hotel: knowledgeable, funny, slightly dangerous, and likely to wander from publishing contracts to dinosaurs without signaling the turn.
An archived guest essay hosted on Harlan Ellison’s website shows Riddell discussing the realities of professional writing with his characteristic mix of bluntness and dark comedy. Rather than presenting authorship as a magical procession of inspiration, applause, and tasteful book tours, he emphasized waiting, rejection, difficult editors, delayed payment, and the stubborn labor required to continue.
Paul Riddell’s Books and Collected Writing
Several publications preserve Riddell’s earlier work. The most notable include Squashed Armadillocon, Greasing the Pan: The “Best” of Paul T. Riddell, and The Savage Pen of Onan: The “Best” of the Hell’s Half-Acre Herald.
Published in 2009, Greasing the Pan is a substantial collection of essays and commentary from his science fiction writing career. Bibliographic records list the book as a 484-page literary collection issued by Fantastic Books. The Savage Pen of Onan, also published in 2009, gathers material from the online publication Hell’s Half-Acre Herald, which Riddell wrote between 1998 and 2002. That collection runs more than 400 pages, suggesting that even an “audience of dozens,” as its promotional description jokes, can generate enough material to endanger a small coffee table.
These books are valuable because they document a transitional moment in media. Print magazines were shrinking, internet publishing was expanding, and writers were experimenting with online voices before “content creator” became a job title uttered during tax appointments. Riddell’s work belongs to that unruly bridge between traditional magazine culture and the modern independent web.
The Famous Dalek Security Incident
No overview of Paul Riddell would be complete without the Daleks.
In 1987, Riddell was working at a Texas Instruments facility involved in defense-related technology. According to a later account reported by the Dallas Observer, a supervisor jokingly asked whether he had sold any secrets to the Russians. Riddell replied that he had instead sold some to the Daleks, the fictional armored villains from Doctor Who.
The joke did not land. In fact, it achieved the opposite of landing: it apparently climbed the security hierarchy.
Because Doctor Who was far less familiar to mainstream American audiences at the time, some people involved did not recognize “Daleks” as a pop-culture reference. The remark was reportedly investigated until FBI agents familiar with the television series understood the situation. Riddell was cleared of assisting extraterrestrial fascists, and Earth’s missile technology remained safely outside the hands of creatures equipped with plungers and severe emotional-management problems.
The incident became one of his best-known anecdotes because it captures several recurring elements of his life and writing: technology, institutional seriousness, genre knowledge, bureaucratic confusion, and a joke that became much larger than its original habitat.
From Professional Writing to Carnivorous Plants
The Origins of the Texas Triffid Ranch
After stepping away from regular professional publication in 2002, Riddell moved to Tallahassee, Florida. There he encountered native carnivorous plants, particularly North American pitcher plants. What began as curiosity developed into serious horticultural work.
By 2008, carnivorous plants had become a major pursuit. The project eventually evolved into the Texas Triffid Ranch, named after John Wyndham’s 1951 science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids. In Wyndham’s story, dangerous mobile plants contribute to the collapse of civilization. Riddell’s plants were considerably better behaved, although many still regarded insects as a convenient tasting menu.
The Texas Triffid Ranch opened as a dedicated gallery in 2015. It presented carnivorous plants inside carefully designed enclosures that combined horticulture, visual art, natural history, and speculative storytelling. Visitors could encounter pitcher plants, sundews, butterworts, and other species while learning how they evolved to obtain nutrients from animal prey.
More Gallery Than Conventional Plant Store
Calling the Texas Triffid Ranch a plant shop misses much of the point. Riddell treated the plants as subjects of interpretation rather than products lined up beside fertilizer. Displays often incorporated ecological information, artistic staging, and fictional backstories. This made the gallery accessible to gardeners, science fiction readers, artists, families, and curious visitors who had never seriously considered being digested by a vegetable.
Media reports described a collection containing roughly 100 carnivorous plant species and, at one stage, more than 200 carnivorous, prehistoric, and exotic specimens. Riddell also used ultraviolet light to demonstrate fluorescence and visual signals that plants may use to attract prey. His educational style turned botanical mechanisms into memorable stories without stripping away the underlying science.
The gallery became a distinctive North Texas attraction and was recognized by travel and local-culture publications. It demonstrated how a private obsession could grow into a public experienceprovided it received the correct soil mixture and nobody watered it with ordinary tap water.
Why the Texas Triffid Ranch Closed
The public gallery closed in early 2023. Riddell attributed the decision primarily to rising rent, which made continued operation impractical. The closure ended the permanent physical location, but it did not erase the project’s influence. Articles, photographs, visitor accounts, and former displays continue to document how the Ranch connected science, art, and science fiction.
The Return to Writing
Riddell never disappeared completely from publishing. In March 2019, his nonfiction piece “The Magician’s Garden” appeared in issue 150 of Clarkesworld Magazine, an internationally recognized science fiction and fantasy publication. The issue also included fiction by writers such as Kij Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Rich Larson, and D.A. Xiaolin Spires.
After the Texas Triffid Ranch closed, writing once again became a central project. In May 2024, he began publishing The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College. The project initially appeared through Substack and later expanded to its own website.
What Is St. Remedius Medical College?
St. Remedius Medical College is fictional, although its presentation often imitates institutional history so convincingly that an inattentive reader may wonder whether the admissions department accepts interdimensional transfer credits.
Within Riddell’s fictional universe, St. Remedius was a Dallas educational institution connected to “exonormal” events: supernatural, extraterrestrial, magical, technological, and otherwise difficult-to-file phenomena. The college trained students to distinguish authentic anomalies from hoaxes and delusions. It also became involved with impossible research, secret histories, alternate realities, institutional rivalries, strange creatures, and a reality-spanning conflict known as the Quantum War.
The central mystery is the college’s disappearance. In the developing mythology, the campus vanished without killing or injuring the people associated with it, leaving behind questions, records, artifacts, and a large gap where an institution was supposed to be. The stories reconstruct its culture through archival fragments, reports, announcements, historical essays, personal accounts, and campus traditions.
Why the Project Fits Paul Riddell
St. Remedius combines nearly every major thread in Riddell’s career. It includes science fiction, satire, regional history, institutional language, technical detail, biology, folklore, media criticism, and a fascination with the objects left behind by human activity.
The fictional-college format also allows him to write in many voices. One installment may resemble a historical archive, another a campus guide, and another an account of a magical disaster that someone has attempted to classify as a routine maintenance issue. The humor grows from treating the impossible with bureaucratic confidence.
Dallas is more than a convenient background. Riddell uses recognizable qualities of North Texasrapid development, corporate power, scientific industry, sprawling geography, cultural ambition, and local eccentricityto make the fictional material feel grounded. The result resembles regional folklore from a timeline that took a wrong exit near the freeway interchange.
Paul Riddell’s Writing Style and Recurring Themes
Humor Without Abandoning Research
Riddell’s humor is often sarcastic, referential, and rooted in accumulated knowledge. The joke may depend on an old science fiction convention, a biological adaptation, a forgotten television program, or the particular way a large institution writes a memo when reality has cracked open beside the employee parking lot.
Yet the humor does not replace research. His strongest work uses detailed knowledge as the structure supporting the comedy. Paleontology, horticulture, publishing history, speculative fiction, and local culture are not decorations. They provide the mechanisms that make his fictional worlds operate.
Affection for Outsiders and Obscure Subjects
Another recurring theme is his interest in things overlooked by conventional culture. Carnivorous plants, small publications, science fiction fandom, vanished institutions, obsolete technologies, eccentric specialists, and forgotten buildings repeatedly appear in his work.
Rather than smoothing these subjects into mainstream entertainment, he preserves their strangeness. A pitcher plant remains biologically alien. A fan convention remains socially chaotic. A fictional college remains too complicated to summarize on a respectable brochure. Riddell’s work suggests that obscurity is not a defect; sometimes it is where the interesting organisms live.
Why Paul Riddell Is Worth Discovering
Paul Riddell’s significance does not depend on one bestseller, television adaptation, or conventional literary prize. It comes from the unusual continuity between his interests. Writing led into science communication. Science fiction inspired a carnivorous plant gallery. The gallery encouraged museum-style interpretation. Its closure helped create space for a new fictional archive.
His career also illustrates how creative work can pause, mutate, and return in another form. The writer who left professional publication did not stop observing, collecting, teaching, and building stories. Those activities moved into living plant displays and later returned to prose with additional layers of experience.
For readers interested in speculative nonfiction, independent publishing, carnivorous plants, Dallas culture, or elaborate fictional institutions, Riddell offers a body of work that rarely behaves as expected. He is best approached with curiosity, patience, and perhaps a reasonable understanding of why feeding hamburger to a Venus flytrap is a bad idea.
Experiencing Paul Riddell’s Work: A Reader’s Field Guide
The most rewarding way to experience Paul Riddell’s work is not to treat it as a standard biography with a clean beginning, middle, and end. His projects form a network. Follow one path and it leads to science fiction magazines. Follow another and you end up examining the digestive chemistry of pitcher plants. A third route deposits you at a fictional Dallas medical college where the administration appears to consider dimensional instability a scheduling inconvenience.
Begin with the shorter St. Remedius pieces rather than attempting to memorize the entire invented history. Read them as artifacts recovered from a larger world. Notice how official announcements, historical records, campus legends, and technical explanations contradict or reinforce one another. This produces the sensation of exploring an archive rather than simply reading a linear story.
The experience becomes richer when paired with a little Dallas context. Riddell’s humor frequently draws energy from North Texas: corporate campuses, ambitious construction, long highways, vanished retail spaces, scientific industries, and the region’s ability to place polished respectability beside magnificent weirdness. Familiarity with that setting helps readers understand why St. Remedius feels impossible and strangely plausible at the same time.
His earlier essay collections offer a different experience. They reflect the argumentative culture of print magazines, fanzines, conventions, and the early internet. Some references belong firmly to their period, but that is part of their value. They show how science fiction communities talked about themselves before social media compressed every disagreement into an emergency conducted beneath a promotional video.
Learning about the Texas Triffid Ranch adds another layer. Photographs and reports from the former gallery reveal that Riddell’s worldbuilding was never limited to text. Plant enclosures combined living organisms, design, labels, educational material, and stories. A visitor did not merely inspect a plant; the visitor encountered a tiny ecosystem framed as an exhibition.
That museum-like approach helps explain his later fiction. St. Remedius stories often operate like display cases. Each installment presents an object, event, person, or fragment of history. Readers supply connections between the pieces. The pleasure comes partly from information and partly from wondering what has been deliberately omitted.
Readers can also use Riddell’s career as a creative example. A subject does not need to remain inside one professional category. An interest in science fiction can influence gardening. Gardening can become installation art. Exhibition design can shape fictional archives. Technical writing can make invented phenomena sound disturbingly credible. Creative experience accumulates even when a person appears to have changed fields entirely.
The ideal Paul Riddell experience therefore involves wandering. Read an essay, examine a carnivorous plant, learn why the Daleks once caused a security misunderstanding, and then return to St. Remedius with a better appreciation of how reality becomes material for fiction. Just avoid submitting an application to the college. The campus is missing, the departments may exist in several incompatible universes, and financial aid probably requires proof of thaumaturgic residency.
Conclusion
Paul T. Riddell is a Dallas writer, satirist, science fiction commentator, former carnivorous plant gallery operator, and creator of one of the stranger fictional educational institutions to vanish from North Texas. His career links the independent publishing culture of the 1990s with public science education, botanical art, online storytelling, and archival worldbuilding.
The common element is curiosity. Riddell examines subjects that other people overlook, treats obscure knowledge as useful raw material, and finds humor in the collision between extraordinary events and ordinary institutions. Whether he is discussing writers, plants, fan culture, government security, or exonormal university policy, his work asks readers to look more closely. Something strange is probably happening just below the label.
Editorial note: Several professionals and public figures share the name Paul Riddell. This article specifically profiles Paul T. Riddell, the Dallas-based American writer, former Texas Triffid Ranch operator, and creator of The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College. Biographical statements have been distinguished from the deliberately fictional claims used in his St. Remedius mythology.
