Novel
The Inhuman Peace
A biopunk Colombo from an alternate future. Colonialism. A machine uprising. And the consequences.
Hi. I'm Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.
I'm a storyteller from Colombo, Sri Lanka. I show up in many different guises - an award-winning author, OSINT journalist, data scientist, occasional game designer and AI programmer. Welcome to my portfolio and digital garden.
I’ve been featured in some interesting places.
Major Work
My stories have won the Gratiean Prize, been nominated for the Nebula and Independent Games Festival awards, appeared in venues like Wired, ForeignPolicy and Slate, and been Washington Post and Audible bestsellers. These are my biggest, publicly accessible works.
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Anthology
Mohs 5.5 Megastructures
A curated collection of global science fiction stories centered around megastructures and massive feats of engineering.
Novel
The Inhuman Race
A biopunk Colombo from an alternate future. Colonialism. A machine uprising. And the consequences.
Works In Progress
I’m usually working on several things at any given time. Sometimes these are tiny projects - sometimes they’re long, perpetual, possibly Sisyphean acts of tomfoolery. This is what I’m working on right now.
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Anthology
The Slow Sad Suicide and Other Stories
A collection of short stories written between 2017 and 2022.
Novel
The Salvage Crew 2 aka Humble Cosmic Pilgrim
AI x deep space journeys x first contact x Buddhism
Novel
Claws and Effect
A magical cat and a paladin set out to hustle their way through a fantasy world.
Novel
The Wretched and the Damned
A group of superpowered malcontents take down the corrupt, nepotistic government of Sri Lanka.
Institutions
I've worked at or with a number of very interesting organizations, including
Watchdog
Cofounder + CEO + Editor in Chief
Watchdog is a multidisciplinary team of journalists, researchers and software engineers. We began in April 2019, days after the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, building a mobile app that was used by over 200,000 people to verify information and counteract rumors in their own networks. We've since moved on to identifying mass graves, doing deep data dives into public infrastructure, and building open-source software now used by the Ministry of Health and Red Cross Sri Lanka. We use a lot of OSINT techniques - a combination of data scraping, analysis of publicly available documents and datasets, paired with old-school boots-on-the-ground journalism.
The Dangerous Speech Project
Research Fellow
As a fellow for the Dangerous Speech Project, I collected datasets and studied ethnic hatred and justifications of war crimes centered around the Sri Lankan Civil War, as well as the historical context that led up to it.
Sci-Fi Economics Lab
Architect
I functioned as lead designer and writer of Project Witness, an open-source climate-addled future exploring alternate economic structures and their societies. Working with the very multi-disciplinary folks over at Edgeryders, I co-designed societies, built religions, fleshed out institutions, interactions and lore, and built a card game where different types of societies react to Black Swan events. Because of the team, and the sheer variety and depth and understanding of very different economic principles that they held, I came away with a lot more knowledge than I walked in with.
LIRNEasia
Senior Researcher, Big Data For Development
Our unit was centered on data science x public policy in the Global South - things like using millions of call detail records to identify where we need better road infrastructure. My work included grounded futurisms, examinations of digital laws, and academic work on corpus linguistics, social networks and machine learning, occasionally carrying out research collaborations with the University of Moratuwa. It greatly honed my understanding of the world and my technical skills, esepcially around linguistics; the majority of outputs from this time are easily available via Google Scholar.
WSO2
Marketing exec, Big Data neophyte
At WSO2 I worked on marketing materials and white papers of middleware implementations. These included projects with folks ranging from Transport for London to the Govt of Maldova. Later, I worked on data projects such as the WSO2 Election Monitor, from design to prototyping to implementation. This was where I got into data science proper.