Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (born November 1992) is a Sri Lankan science fiction author, activist and researcher, classified as part of a new wave of South Asian science fiction writers.[1] His research primarily centers around social media, networks and language. His debut novel Numbercaste has been acclaimed in South Asia[2][3][4] for its blend of emerging technology and socio-political critique. His novel The Salvage Crew has been lauded as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2020.[5] Wijeratne is the second Sri Lankan to be nominated for a Nebula Award since Arthur C. Clarke.[6]

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Born (1992-11-26) 26 November 1992
Ratnapura, Sri Lanka
OccupationAuthor, researcher, activist
GenreSpeculative fiction
Science fiction
Fantasy
Notable worksNumbercaste, The Salvage Crew, The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, "Messenger"
Website
yudhanjaya.com

He is noted for being a proponent of human-AI collaboration in fiction[7] as well as being the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization founded partly to counter misinformation in the wake of state propaganda and inaction.[8][9] His work has appeared in Wired (magazine), Foreign Policy and Slate (magazine).

Early life

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]


Career

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]

Awards and nominations

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

Influences

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]

References

  1. "Yudhanjaya Wijeratne". www.platform-mag.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  2. "Efflorescence of South Asian Sci Fi?". The Daily Star. 2017-12-30. Archived from the original on 2018-03-09. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  3. "Love the journey. Live for it: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne". FactorDaily. 2018-05-05. Archived from the original on 2018-06-13. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  4. "The Sri Lankan Sci-fi Novel "Numbercaste" just dropped, and it's hot". Lanka Comic Con. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  5. Liptak, Andrew (2021-01-10). "The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2020". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
  6. Editorial (2019-02-21). "Sci-Fi Writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne amongst the 2019 Nebula Award Nominees". Pulse. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
  7. "Co-writing With Artificial Intelligence With Yudhanjaya Wijeratne | The Creative Penn". www.thecreativepenn.com. 2021-01-18. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
  8. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2019-04-25). "The Social Media Block Isn't Helping Sri Lanka". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  9. "These are the false news stories that prompted a social media ban in Sri Lanka". Dateline. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
  10. "Icarus Weeps No More | The Sunday Leader". Archived from the original on 2017-04-30. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  11. "TEDxColombo 2018: You really should grab your tickets now". README. 2018-10-11. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  12. Dibbert, Taylor (2017-07-10). "Yudhanjaya Wijeratne On Books And Writing". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on 2019-02-06. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  13. "[Op-ed] Investigative Journalists uncover Asia, one story at a time". Open Minds! (formerly: Moving Images blog). 2016-09-23. Archived from the original on 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
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  15. "This Is The Colombo Port City?". Colombo Telegraph. 2015-03-30. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  16. "Sri Lanka Floods Update (May 23rd)". YAMU. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  17. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya. "Big Data and Politics: How the Internet sees the US Election". wso2.com. Archived from the original on 2017-09-11. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  18. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya. "Deep Huge: AI Predicts Donald Trump Becoming the Next President". wso2.com. Archived from the original on 2017-11-10. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  19. Samarajiva, Rohan; Lokanathan, Sriganesh; Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2018-03-14). "Countries of a Feather: Analyzing Homophily and Connectivity Between Nations Through Facebook Data". Rochester, NY. SSRN 3140408. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. Safi, Libby Hogan Michael (2018-04-03). "Revealed: Facebook hate speech exploded in Myanmar during Rohingya crisis". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2019-02-06. Retrieved 2019-02-04.
  21. Bengali, Shashank. "Muslims faced hatred and violence in Sri Lanka. Then Facebook came along and made things worse". latimes.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-13. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  22. "Facebook, language and the difficulty of moderating hate speech". Media@LSE. 2020-07-23. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
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  24. Serrato, Raymond; Hattotuwa, Sanjana; Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2018-10-30). "Artificial Humanity: Counteracting the Threat of Bot Networks on Social Media". Rochester, NY. SSRN 3275128. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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  26. malia.graves_6743 (2019-11-27). "IGF 2019 – Day 2 – Convention Hall II – Addressing Terrorist And Violent Extremist Content Online". Internet Governance Forum. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
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  32. "Post Numbercaste, Yudhanjaya dreams up more worlds". The Sunday Times Sri Lanka. Archived from the original on 2018-06-21. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  33. Laghate, Gaurav. "Endemol Shine India acquires rights of Richa Mukherjee's 'Kanpur Khoofiya'". The Economic Times. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  34. "This sci-fi author built a world in which you rate your neighbour". GQ India. 2018-12-15. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  35. "Being Inhuman: Emotion, ethics, adventure and artificial intelligence intersect in Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's latest novel". FactorDaily. 2019-01-05. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  36. "Critters Writers Workshop Readers Poll". www.critique.org. Archived from the original on 2015-09-16. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
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  38. "Four authors. One future". project2054.com. Archived from the original on 2018-06-27. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  39. "Samuel Peralta". Samuel Peralta. Archived from the original on 2018-11-21. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  40. "Behance". www.behance.net. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  41. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2020-09-26). "Read a New Short Story About a Government Run Entirely by Machines". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  42. "The Future of Work: 'Work Ethics,' by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  43. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2019-04-17). "The Poetry Machine". Medium. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  44. "Adventures in machine-generated text: short-burst creativity, and why classical CS has it wrong – The Ricepunk Diaries". Retrieved 2021-02-03.
  45. Bennett, Tara (2020-10-07). "Firefly's Nathan Fillion aims to misbehave in space again as AI narrator of 'The Salvage Crew'". SYFY WIRE. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
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  47. copyrighted, The material on this website is; SFWA®, may not be used without the author's consent; Fiction, Nebula Awards® are registered trademarks of Science; America, Fantasy Writers of; SFWA, Inc Opinions expressed on this web site are not necessarily those of (2019-02-20). "2018 Nebula Finalists Announced". The Nebula Awards. Retrieved 2019-03-04.
  48. "About me / Press". yudhanjaya. Archived from the original on 2018-08-24. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
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