Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Wijeratne grew up wanting to be an astronaut, but instead decided the odds were against him. Discovering Stephen King's The Dark Tower led to him being inspired to sit down and write The Waste, which he describes as "a 130,000 word monster set in a half-magic half-tech world .. . it was horrible: I have the manuscript on my desk and the cat sleeps on it sometimes."[4]

Largely self-taught, he picked up programming after school and went through a stint in game development, working on a project set in a distant future.[10] That failed, and eventually led to Wijeratne becoming a tech journalist and founding editor of Readme.lk, a Sri Lankan tech news website.[11]

In 2015 he joined WSO2, a middleware corporation headquartered in Colombo, and began working on his debut novel, Numbercaste.[12] During this period, he was perhaps best known in Sri Lanka for the blog he maintained, Icaruswept, which was noted by science writer Nalaka Gunawardene for its data-savvy analyses.[13] Icaruswept garnered a reputation for analyses around social media influence on the Sri Lankan 2015 general election,[14] reporting on the Colombo International Financial City and coverage of the 2017 Sri Lanka floods. While the blog now appears to be defunct, key posts remain mirrored on other publications.[15][16]

Wijeratne also worked on the WSO2 Election Monitor, which generated attention and sentiment analysis around the election contests.[17] In an (apparent) parody piece for April Fool's Day, he used observations from the project's actual data to suggest Donald Trump's victory.[18] Wijeratne then joined LIRNEasia as a researcher, where his work involved the analysis of communities on social media[19] misinformation and hate speech[20][21][22] and bot networks.[23][24][25] He has since spoken extensively about the moderation of terrorist and violent content online at the Internet Governance Forum[26] and avenues such as ForeignPolicy.

In 2018, Wijeratne gave a TEDx talk, outlining his roots as a blogger and his philosophy of avoiding homophily and groupthink wherever possible.[27]

Wijeratne's first publication was the self-published The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne,[12] which follows a suicidal, near-immortal alcoholic who signs up to be shot into a Ring singularity. Reviews compared it favourably to the work of both Clarke and Douglas Adams.[28] Wijeratne followed with his debut novel, Numbercaste,[4] which garnered critical acclaim in Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi media for its depiction of a near-future world where social influence is quantified and used in lieu of credit - an idea not too different from China's proposed Social Credit systems.

Numbercaste has been deemed both a "staggeringly ambitious debut"[29] and a contemplation of the misuse of Big Data, surveillance and class divisions that is both utopian and dystopian at the same time.[3][2] It led to Wijeratne being lauded by Groundviews as the "first serious voice" in science fiction from Sri Lanka since Arthur C. Clarke,[30] and is classified as Econ-SF by the Edgeryders research network. In 2018, Wijeratne was the recipient of a four-book deal by HarperCollins,[31] noted by the Sunday Times as the largest deal, in terms of books, ever offered to a Sri Lankan author;[32] Numbercaste was among those four books, and saw its film options acquired by Endemol Shine.[33] Wijeratne subsequently self-published Omega Point, a short story invoking French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis of God and marrying it to the Kardashev scale.[3]

His second novel, The Inhuman Race [34] an alternate history narrative set in Sri Lanka, and explores AI, sentience and AI rights in a futuristic world where the British Commonwealth still dominates the Indian subcontinent. It has been noted for subverting philosopher John Searle's chinese room thought experiment and cementing Wijeratne's "status as one of the subcontinent’s science fiction stars".[35]

Since then, he has published in a number of anthologies. Messenger, co-authored with American urban fantasy author R.R. Virdi, was listed in the Critters Annual Reader Poll as one of the top ten science fiction stories of 2018 [36] and was a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards.[37] Alongside J.T. Lawrence, Jason Werbeloff and Colby Rice, Wijeratne also launched 2054,[32][38] a shared-world cyberpunk anthology foreworded by physicist, poet and Future Chronicles editor Samuel Peralta.[39] Wijeratne has one known comics project, a 4-page short titled Genesis.[40]

In 2020, Slate.com published The State Machine[41] under its Future Tense program, and Wired published Work Ethics.[42] Both stories explore themes of human-AI collaboration; one from the perspective of governance and the other examining the future of work. Both betray a fascination, and support for a collaborative future, something Wijeratne references in interviews and blogposts. Subsequent tinkerings with OpenAI GPT-2 led him to explore generated poetry [43] and attempt to create a novel by co-writing with procedural generation tools that he had written and with GPT-2.[44] The result was Wijeratne's Salvage Crew, published in 2020. Narrated by Nathan Fillion;[45] it became a bestseller on Audible[46] and was selected by Polygon as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2020.[5]

Wijeratne was nominated for the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.[47]

Wijeratne's website lists a wide range of possible influences, from novelists (such as Terry Pratchett, William Gibson, Diana Wynne Jones and others) to anime (such as Ghost in the Shell and Fullmetal Alchemist) to games (such as BioShock, Deus Ex (video game), Halo (franchise) and Final Fantasy VII).[48] Elsewhere, he has spoken about being influenced by Stephen King,[4] Dan Simmons,[3] Peter Watts,[34] Warhammer 40K, Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin.[4]