Interviewing Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Hello!

One of my favourite science fiction reads of the year so far has been  Pilgrim Machones by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne a take of Ships with AI minds deciding to explore the universe and finding it a changing journey in so many ways ( reviewed here - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2025/1/6/pilgrim-machines-by-yudhanjaya-wijeratne?format=amp ) its full of epic scenes, surprises and just a great central inhuman character to meet and understand. It was a pleasure to invite Yudhanjaya back to the blog to talk about this book.

How do you like to booktempt Pilgrim machines?

A starship is sent out to the heart of the galaxy to find God, or something so close as to make no difference. Some of it's about the journey; some of it's about the people making the journey.

We are so often used with tales of starships to focus on the brave crew but unusually we focus on the Ship’s Mind. What led you to Blue Cherry Blossom as your main character?

The stories as experienced by these ship minds are a key feature of this series (or sequence). The convention started out in Salvage Crew. It continues in Pilgrim Machines and it continues in the book after that.

The whole reason for why I'm so focused on the ship-minds is that I have a bit of an obsession with the inhuman; particularly the machine. It shows up in some of my other works as well, like the Commonwealth Empires Trilogy, which is specifically about bots in a Lord of the Flies-esque alternate future Ceylon; it shows up in the kind of things that I like to think are feeding into this world of PCS and the Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines. That is to say, Peter Watt's Blindsight, Iain Banks' Culture Series, some amount of Alistair Reynolds and so on.

And within that the ship-minds that I like to write about are, on some level, a representation of something, if not a clean metaphor. For example, if the Overseer / Amber Rose from the salvage crew is an exploration of anxiety, then Blue Cherry Blossom is on some level a lens for the depression that I was going through at the time; where one is capable of being perfectly functional, but is looking a reason to continue existing outside the webs of duty and obligation.

And I knew that for this one, I wanted a sense of wonder. Unlike with the Salvage Crew, I didn't want the main character to be a third-rater on the edge of nowhere. I wanted a ship that was an incredibly powerful, sophisticated marvel of engineering in its particular class. I wanted a ship that could actually be a candidate for deep space exploration; something that was suited both physically and cognitively for that long and dangerous task. I wanted something that people would not only want to join, but something that professionals in this universe would actually be proud of serving on. Hence Blue Cherry Blossom.

Even with the human/AI minds the concept of the journey and exploring is a theme the story highlights is a very human desire going back millennia. With this journey to the stars what did you want to highlight?

I wanted to pay homage, in a sense, to that deep-seated urge within ourselves to go out and see new things. Sometimes these urges have led to massive leaps in civilizational progress. Sometimes they've led to horrific slaughter. And many times they've led to nothing but just death and silence.

And yet we keep doing it. We keep reaching for that frontier simply because it's there and we want to know what lies beyond. We want to push that margin forever and ever as we move.

The various stops along the way allow us to see both wonders of space and also huge ancient Science Fictional vistas and  ideas like a mass starship graveyard. How did you plan the journey and how it would impact the story?

With this journey, I was kind of exploring the sense of wonder that I had as a child, when I would look out at the stars and wonder what was out there. And the universe is kind in this regard. Probability alone guarantees that there are so many strange sights out there.

Of course, it all blurs together a little bit, but if I look back, I have made at least three discrete attempts at planning this journey. The first thing I did was to write a galaxy generator. I've put it up on GitHub since then; what it does is it basically tries to generate star systems, planets around them;  it gives all these stats on what the star’s temperatures are and what atmospheric conditions on the planets are like and so on and so forth; and then it tries to sketch out potential civilizations.

This was an interesting piece of technical wizardry and I did gain the satisfaction of writing a piece of code that could procedurally generate a universe. But I realized very soon that I wasn't very interested in that particular universe. By the time I had finished the Salvage Crew, I had something in mind, something that was coalescing a lot more deeply and a lot more firmly in my head. So I threw aside the toy and I started thinking about the end, about Beacon’s civilization, about all the things that they might have seen.

Then I started digging into the actual science and actually looking up star charts and actually planning a path. I started with the end by reading papers on the region around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. I worked my way backwards along the spiral arms, noting the clusters of stars and conditions and notable highlights of the journey. I work my way forwards again using the Chrome 100,000 stars experiment (https://stars.chromeexperiments.com/) as well as star charts. The Chrome experiment is truly incredible, by the way. It's an incredible feat of visualization. I devoured wikipedia entries on the linguistics of old astronomy efforts and I read academic papers on the compositions of interstellar gas and downloaded NASA imagery on the layout of the stars in the Pleiades cluster.

Once I knew the road, I started laying down the landmarks and the highlights of the journey. And I worked in this fashion, going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, until I had a good sense of the time, in narrative terms, that they would take to get from point A to point B, and what they would see on the way.

How much fun was writing the Stranger’s unusual human yet alien terms of speech?

The stranger's unusual human-yet-alien cadence is actually a local AI model, set up in a way that it would constantly have a speech pattern that was ever so slightly off. The way I did this was to actually first write that conversation in Sinhala, which has a slightly different order of phrasing from English, and then run it through this local AI model as a translation; and obviously the translation was imperfect. Its grammar and its syntax were nowhere near what I might have deemed accurate; and thus, two degrees away from attempted sanity, it was exactly what I needed. I honestly think I spent more time trying to get that thing working than actually writing the text - and I really enjoyed it.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and this in this weird world of social media where can you find out more?

Well, the next book in the sequence, The Choir of Hatred, is coming out in April. It's not a sequel to Pilgrim Machines, but rather something that happened in the background in such a way that eventually led to the seed conditions for the Salvage Crew. As with all of these books, they don't have to be read in order; they don't even have to be read together at all; they are actually stand-alone stories, but the web of narrative causality ties them together in interesting ways, should you care to explore it.

I’m on yudhanjaya.com - @yudhanjaya on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, although I check social media much less than I used to.