Interviewing Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Hellooo!!!

I’m been recently wowed by the intriguing science fiction novel The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne . Part alien planet adventure tale and part exploration of what is the difference between human and artificial intelligence it reminded me of the work of Iain M Banks with a twenty first century feel and a lot of heart in it’s inhuman lead character. Yudhanjaya kindly agreed to talk to me about the book and the process of writing it using some truly inventive ideas.

OC is an absolutely fascinating lead character and voice – what led to their creation?

Well, as it always does, a bunch of completely unrelated trains pulled up at a station in my head, and started unloading their cargo.

The first was this business of being a machine poet. When I started writing the Salvage Crew, OpenAI had just put out their GPT-2 text model - and it was making some serious waves online. I happen to be in the space, so on a whim, I downloaded it, retrained it on translation of my favourite Tang dynasty poets, and voila! A poet. I even gave it an instagram account (@osunpoet) and they began to gather a small following.  I ended up in Berlin at the tail end of 2019, presenting this to some of our research funders. A lot of my research revolves around misinformation, so I was quite naturally pointing out what a lot of us felt was an emerging threat - the ability to construct entire sites’ worth of content, or reviews, in seconds, and to give enormous social weight to fake news campaigns. People were impressed, but not enough to fund more work into it.

But this really got me thinking. Not just about writing and the automation thereof, but about AI, and human-AI collaboration of the sort that Gary Kasparov demonstrated when he, after being beaten by Deep Blue at chess in the late 90’s, began to champion Advanced Chess - [ human + AI]  vs [ human + AI]. I thought right, enough mucking about talking about collaboration: time to take the leap and actually live this cyberpunk stuff we’re talking about. So I ended up exploring the possibilities, quite a lot of it drawing from techniques that game programmers have used for a long time: https://yudhanjaya.com/2020/05/machine-generated-text-creativity-and-why-classical-cs-has-it-wrong/

And then another train pulled up. Cortana, from Halo, an AI created by imprinting a human mind. I like Cortana, as a storyteller, because a lot of people default to imagining AI as a digitized human: there’s no sense of a true Other of the kind you get in Peter Watt’s Blindsight, or even in my 2019 novel The Inhuman Race. I liked that Halo had come up with a canonical reason for having Cortana be quirky and emotive and a character you felt attached to.

The third train was every simulation game I’ve played. OC is a lot like me when I play a colony SIM game. Give me a few hours in Rimworld and I essentially default to OC’s persona, except instead of poetry I go for smoke breaks and try to explain to the cat why my colonists are such bumbling idiots. All these things piled together in my head, and started sparking off each other, and before I knew it I had the seed: an angry drop-pod yelling at a bunch of colonists and being absolutely pissed off at the corporatocracy they operate within.

One of the most impressive parts of the book is the flow so it changes from a simple mission to by the end something very very different - was that always part of your plotting and what ed to those choice?

I think we can blame Wittgenstein and T.S. Eliot for this. 2018, Mozambique: I was presenting a paper on political bot networks [1], and afterwards I wandered out for a smoke. And I overheard someone say “The Internet is real, but not actual.”

Well, quite naturally I had to understand what the hell he meant by that. So we fell into a conversation about how the word ‘the Internet’ is like ‘Nature’; a meaningless abstraction that we use to represent a much more complex reality. I stole a bottle of wine to continue the conversation with. Eventually we ended up arguing over Wittgenstein:  If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

The wine ran out, but the words stuck in my head, so over the next year I casually kicked around the idea of an alien to whom we were the lions, speaking a language it didn’t know or give a damn about. Our language of satellites, of binary, of the sheer amount of communications noise we generate, or even mathematics. What if there was an alien to whom the only acceptable sign of intelligence was someone playing the language game, where the meaning of a word of sentence would only make sense within the context of the ‘game’ being played? What was a good example of that?

By meandering paths I came to writing another paper on language, and I quoted T.S. Eliot in it [2].  And I re-read The Waste Lands. And there, I went, aha, this is it. I have absolutely no idea what the hell Eliot going on about in specific here, but I somehow understand it. I get the fear in a handful of dust. We have played a language game, and it’s poetry.

And I already had the poet-bot in my mind.

So now I had the beginning and the end: the middle is where things get funky, because a lot of that was a bunch of programs I had written suggesting what I should do and me turning that into something that connected the dots. Co-creation was the point of the game - and really, I wanted to have fun merging two things I’m passionate about. I like game design. I like programming. I like writing. I like experimenting with algorithms.

So Anna, Milo and Simon are all constructs with stats generated by R Code. The world was likewise Zarkonnen’s planet generator. The Mercers and their attacks? Again, R. Even the weather - that was a Markov chain implementation done in a spreadsheet, because I was feeling lazy. So the flow was a bunch of programs handing ingredients to me, and me selecting what I felt would best take us from point A to point B.  Serendipitous moments would happen, like the weather control deciding it would start making things colder, and lead to snow; while eventgen threw in three Mercers and another salvage run; and my mind would immediately jump to: this change, let it mark a change in tone. These enemies, let them be camoflauged.  Let them make the journey in terror. It’s seriously some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

This universe feels fascinating do you think you will ever return to it?

Absolutely. We’ve got two more books planned. I have a galaxy generator (https://twitter.com/yudhanjaya/status/1354898650506395652). I have some stuff I want to talk about: building a lingua franca in space - another language game; and about civilizations that thrive and die; and about strange matter.

The audiobook of this novel with Nathan Fillion is proving very popular! What is it like as an author hearing your words delivered by someone else? The same as reading or gives you a different perspective?

I’d say it’s a bit like being Trent Reznor and listening to Johnny Cash covering ‘Hurt’ for the first time. Really changes the texture of what you’d imagined. Fillion basically took OC and made him whole. It does change my view of the character. Anna, Simon and Milo have very different voices in my head, but OC speaks like Fillion does now, right down to that wry, smooth intensity.

How is the SF scene in Sri Lanka? Anyone we should be looking out for?

Well, the image of SF as a whole is dominated by Arthur C. Clarke, because Sri Lanka was where he lived out a large portion of his life. But we’re now seeing a few different voices emerge. You should look our for my friend Navin Weeraratne: we’ve done some anthology work together, we both have some stories in the upcoming Gollancz anthology of South Asian science fiction, and he’s working on a pretty exciting project that I can’t talk about right now - but I’m hoping it really takes off.

What is coming from you next and where can we find more?

I have a few things coming out this year.

An open-source science fiction universe designed for exploring postcapitalist economies, built in collaboration with writers, economists, urban designers, architects, and other researchers from around the world. It's a project of the SciFi Economics Lab, which I'm part of:https://scifieconomicslab.net/. Ships March 15. It’s free and open source as in you can write a story in it, a novel, make a movie, hop in and contribute to the canon, do whatever you want.

Neurocracy. A murder in a future world told through the lens of a fictional Wikipedia. Headed by Joannes Truyens: Leigh Alexander, Malka Older and I will be part of the writing behind it.

 The Inhuman Peace (HarperCollins) It's the sequel to the Inhuman Race, a biopunk-ish alternate future Ceylon that's probably best described as Lord of the Flies meets Bioshock. It's a book that's only available in the Indian subcontinent so far.

The State of Data (HarperCollins). A nonfiction work that explores government use and abuse of data from the times of Kautilya and the Maurya empire to modern-day surveillance states, information campaigns, and data aggregators. This will be available everywhere.

The second Gollancz/Hachette South Asian SFF anthology. I have a story there. I also have another story that’ll be going to the Moon (seriously) aboard the Astrobotic Peregrine Lander in July, courtesy of Samuel Peralta, the editor of the Future Chronicles series of anthologies. That’s technically a story from 2019, but it’s a very interesting thing to be a part of.

There's a handful of unannounced stuff I can't talk about (yet).

If you could choose one book (not your own) that you could get everyone to read what would it be?

Just one? Okay, it’s a very tough margin, but I’d say Peter Watts’ Blindsight. No book, for me, has so completely imagined the Other as powerfully: not just as an alien, but an entity that has no evolutionary need for self-awareness. And it’s not just that aspect of the book that makes it so good. There’s the Turing test / Chinese room experiment happening (see John Searle): there’s the incredible neurodivergence of the main cast, which is a strength rather than a weakness; there’s an entire biological alt-history concocted to explain the concept of vampires; there’s a vampire! Visualizing data as screaming faces! It’s simply brilliance, end-to-end.

Refs, in case you need them:

[1] Wijeratne, Y., Hattotuwa, S., & Serrato, R. (2018). Artificial Humanity: Counteracting the Threat of Bot Networks on Social Media. Available at SSRN 3275128.

[2] Wijeratne, Y., de Silva, N., & Shanmugarajah, Y. (2019). Natural language processing for government: Problems and potential. International Development Research Centre (Canada).