Bringing a familiar flavour to sci-fi
For the Sri Lankan science fiction geek, picking up Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s books is like a breath of fresh air. Rather than entering the rubble of New York or some other famous western city in a dystopian future, a reader finds themselves at home, weaving through the dilapidated hotels at Galle Face Green. Imagined alien (literally alien) hierarchies don’t set the stage for conflict. Instead, Kandyan oligarchy, with its familiar flavour of snobbery peppers the text, heightened by the futuristic setting of the narrative.
Author of The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race trilogy, and several other short stories and essays, Yudhanjaya is Sri Lanka’s biggest emerging voice in science fiction. He was a joint winner of the Gratiaen Prize 2023 and has been nominated for the prestigious Nebula award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) in the USA.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
The Sunday Times sat down with the man behind the accolades at the Galle Literary Festival last month. The ‘geek’ was apparent from the get-go. Covered in tattoos that reference his favourite books and pulling quotes from his favourite writers left, right and centre, Yudhanajaya turns chatty the moment he gets the chance to discuss science fiction, technology, world-building, economics or history.
Obsessed with reading, he started writing at age 14 as a way to escape a violent and disruptive childhood. However, his professional writing initially took him away from science fiction. Constructing arguments in his head while working as a salesperson at a tech shop in Majestic City, Yudhanjaya would go home to put his ideas on paper and publish them in the technology journalism platform, readme.lk. Later working at LirneAsia – a think tank, WSO2 – a tech company, and as a freelance journalist and blogger, he immersed himself in economics, history and technology. Ultimately, however, it was this interest in non-fiction fields “that led me back to science fiction,” he said.
As an example, Yudhanjaya explained that his time working at WSO2, creating white papers explaining large data and systems inspired Numbercaste. “There was this case study of a credit scoring agency, one of the largest in the world,” he explained, “this is market forces and capitalism… creating a system far more terrifying than any dictator in Sri Lanka could ever have dreamed of.” From this experience emerged Numbercaste, his debut novel about a dystopian future where data creates a reward and punishment social system.
In science-fiction and fantasy, “world-building” is an extremely important part of writing. Yudhanjaya said he was inspired by the “vastness” and “epicness” of worlds in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. But while he loved fantasy, he found that on the “spectrum” most fantasy was not willing to explore “systems” in a way that science fiction was. Merging his interest in history and economics with his passion for storytelling, Yudhanjaya builds worlds not only in terms of their landscape, creation myths and characters, but also in terms of their production and technological systems. Quoting Alfred Korzybski he emphasizes “the map is not the territory.”
The variety in his texts has attracted a wide audience. People who would not normally read science fiction have picked up his books, appreciating the socio-economic commentary and attention to language.
His life as a coder, designer, researcher, journalist, videogamer, even a salesperson has enriched his writing and made it the dynamic, thorough work that it is. Whenever he wants to know something, he reads and reads and learns it himself, whether it’s code, writing or graphic design. It is this “geeky” quality about him that is most striking, and that has, without a doubt, contributed so significantly to his success as a writer.
Now he is delving into artificial intelligence, training himself in its use to make it a “tool” rather than a “threat” and cautions against writers’ paranoia about AI. Referring to good authors who have used AI in their writing he maintains that it can be a useful tool under the guidance of an experienced and thoughtful person, but that it will be “as hard as ever to produce a great work of literature.”
“I think it’s going to be a self-correcting problem because if you flood a market with garbage, with templated garbage, eventually people who stand out are going to stand out,” he said. With or without AI he believes that this is how the “attention economy” works.
Now tired of his often dark, depressing worlds of fiction, “I want to write about cats,” he says with a smirk that would make one think he’s joking, then adding, “there’s a publishing contract on the table.” A fantasy novel about a cat promising to be full of exorcisms, swords and dragons, the book awaits readers in 2027.
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