Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (born November 1992) is a Sri Lankan science fiction author and researcher, best known for Numbercaste and The Inhuman Race.[1][2] He is classified as part of a new wave of Sri Lankan and South Asian science fiction writers,[3][4] and his near-future work has been noted for its blend of science, emerging technology and socio-political culture.[5] He is noted locally for being the second Sri Lankan to be nominated for a Nebula Award since Arthur C. Clarke.[6] In 2018, Wijeratne gave a TEDx talk, outlining his roots as a blogger and his philosophy of avoiding homophily and groupthink wherever possible.[7]

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

Career

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."[8]

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.[9] That failed, and eventually led to Wijeratne becoming a tech journalist and founding editor of Readme.lk, a Sri Lankan tech news website.[10]

In 2015 he joined WSO2, a middleware corporation headquartered in Colombo, and began working on his debut novel, Numbercaste.[11] 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.[12] Icaruswept garnered a reputation for analyses around social media influence on the Sri Lankan 2015 general election,[13] 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.[14][15]

Wijeratne also worked on the WSO2 Election Monitor, which generated attention and sentiment analysis around the election contests.[16] 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.[17]

Wijeratne then became a researcher at a local policy think tank, LIRNEasia. His work involved the analysis of international community clustering on Facebook,[18] social media blocks and hate speech[19][20] and the rise of bot networks on Twitter.[21][22][23][24] Somewhere within this timeline he was offered a four-book deal by HarperCollins,[25] noted by the Sunday Times as the largest deal, in terms of books, ever offered to a Sri Lankan author.[2] He is a noted proponent of digital publishing.[26][8]

Short fiction

Wijeratne's first publication was the independently published The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne,[11] 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.[27] Wijeratne also released Omega Point, a short story invoking French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis of God and marrying it to the Kardashev scale.[5] Since then, he has published in Future Visions[28] and the Expanding Universe anthologies (Dreadnought[29] and Messenger[30] respectively). 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 [31] and was a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards.[32]

Alongside J.T. Lawrence, Jason Werbeloff and Colby Rice, Wijeratne also launched 2054,[2][33] a shared-world cyberpunk anthology foreworded by physicist, poet and Future Chronicles editor Samuel Peralta.[34] In it, Wijeratne wrote about thorium mining in the Bay of Bengal.

Novels

Wijeratne's debut novel was the independently-published Numbercaste,[8] 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"[35] and a contemplation of the misuse of Big Data, surveillance and class divisions that is both utopian and dystopian at the same time.[5][4] It led to Wijeratne being lauded by Groundviews as the "first serious voice" in science fiction from Sri Lanka since Arthur C. Clarke.[36] As of 2018, it has been acquired and re-printed by HarperCollins India, and is classified as Econ-SF by the Edgeryders research network.

His second novel, The Inhuman Race, is part of a trilogy titled Commonwealth Empires.[37] It is 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".[38] Despite many of these details not being present in the book, Wijeratne has described in detail what the technologies of other nations would look like[39]

Comic works

Wijeratne has one known comics project, a 4-page short titled Genesis.[40]

Awards and nominations

Wijeratne was nominated for the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.[41]

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).[42] Elsewhere, he has spoken about being influenced by Stephen King,[8] Dan Simmons,[5] Peter Watts,[37] Warhammer 40K, Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin.[8]

References
  1. "In This Sri Lankan Sci-Fi Novel, Children Kill Each Other For Sport". HuffPost India. 2019-02-12. Archived from the original on 2019-02-13. Retrieved 2019-02-18.
  2. "Post Numbercaste, Yudhanjaya dreams up more worlds". The Sunday Times Sri Lanka. Archived from the original on 2018-06-21. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  3. "Yudhanjaya Wijeratne". www.platform-mag.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  4. "Efflorescence of South Asian Sci Fi?". The Daily Star. 2017-12-30. Archived from the original on 2018-03-09. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  5. "Love the journey. Live for it: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne". FactorDaily. 2018-05-05. Archived from the original on 2018-06-13. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  6. Editorial (2019-02-21). "Sci-Fi Writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne amongst the 2019 Nebula Award Nominees". Pulse. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
  7. TEDx Talks, How Our Friendships Define Us - And Why They're Dangerous | Yudhanjaya Wijeratne | TEDxColombo, retrieved 2019-01-24
  8. "The Sri Lankan Sci-fi Novel "Numbercaste" just dropped, and it's hot". Lanka Comic Con. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  9. "Icarus Weeps No More | The Sunday Leader". Archived from the original on 2017-04-30. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  10. "TEDxColombo 2018: You really should grab your tickets now". README. 2018-10-11. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  11. 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.
  12. "[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.
  13. "Social Media and General Elecations 2015". www.dailymirror.lk. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  14. "This Is The Colombo Port City?". Colombo Telegraph. 2015-03-30. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  15. "Sri Lanka Floods Update (May 23rd)". YAMU. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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)
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. "Namal Rajapaksa, bots and trolls: New contours of digital propaganda and online discourse in Sri Lanka". Groundviews.org. 2018-01-24. Archived from the original on 2018-06-16. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  22. 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)
  23. "Weaponising 280 characters: What 200,000 tweets and 4,000 bots tell us about state of Twitter in Sri Lanka". Groundviews. Archived from the original on 2018-07-23. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  24. "Power of 'trolls' in Sri Lanka's social media space". Sunday Observer. 2018-07-07. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  25. "HarperCollins India acquires Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s The Commonwealth Empire Trilogy. | Facebook". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  26. Amaruwan, Dilina. "How Digital Publishing Is Challenging The Traditional Print Game". Roar. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  27. "The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  28. "Future Visions – ANTHOLOGIES". www.futurevisions.io. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  29. "The Expanding Universe". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  30. "The Expanding Universe 4". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  31. "Critters Writers Workshop Readers Poll". www.critique.org. Archived from the original on 2015-09-16. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  32. Liptak, Andrew (2019-02-20). "Here are the 2019 Nebula Award nominations". The Verge. Retrieved 2019-02-24.
  33. "Four authors. One future". project2054.com. Archived from the original on 2018-06-27. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  34. "Samuel Peralta". Samuel Peralta. Archived from the original on 2018-11-21. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  35. "Showing the world we too can write science fiction". The Sunday Times Sri Lanka. Archived from the original on 2018-01-08. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  36. "Some thoughts on ‘Numbercaste’ by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne | Facebook". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  37. "This sci-fi author built a world in which you rate your neighbour". GQ India. 2018-12-15. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  38. "Being Inhuman: Emotion, ethics, adventure and artificial intelligence intersect in Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's latest novel". FactorDaily. 2019-01-05. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  39. Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya (2018-05-07). "The Technology of the Commonwealth Empires". yudhanjaya. Archived from the original on 2018-07-02. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  40. "Behance". www.behance.net. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  41. 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.
  42. "About me / Press". yudhanjaya. Archived from the original on 2018-08-24. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
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