The original cover designed by me; the later HarperCollins editions have different covers

Novel

Numbercaste

A near-future where a Silicon Valley startup replaces credit scoring with social media influence checks.

Date: 01 Jul 2017

Overview

Described as “Black Mirror meets the Circle meets 1984” by fans, Numbercaste is an award-winning debut that looks out into an all-too-possible future - a future that’s being built even as you read this.

When Patrick Udo is offered a job at NumberCorp, he packs his bags and goes to the Valley. After all, the 2030s are a difficult time, and jobs are rare. Little does he know that he’s joining one of the most ambitious undertakings of his time or any other. NumberCorp, crunching through vast amounts of social network data, is building a new society - one where everyone’s social circles are examined, their activities quantified, and their importance distilled into the all-powerful Number. A society where the artist is as important as the billionaire. Where those with influence are rewarded, and those without, punished.

As NumberCorp rises in power and in influence, the questions start coming in. What would you do to build the perfect state? And how far is too far?

Purchase Links

Accolades and Recognition

“… a staggeringly ambitious novel. Little eludes Wijeratne’s gaze as he grapples with the implications of emerging technologies, socio-cultural phenomena and political movements.” (Smriti Daniel, writing for The Sunday Times)

“I cannot tell you enough how impressive this is.” (Navin Weeraratne, author of The Hundred-Gram Mission, Burning Eagle, and Zeelam)

“In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s book we may have the beginnings of truly South Asian science fiction, not limited to the quaint and the exotic. His writing engages self-confidently with the reality of people whose roots are here, but whose imaginations, ambitions and domains are not limited either by geography or the globe-straddling corporations they create or shape.” (Rohan Samarajiva, writing for the Daily Star)

Numbercaste did very well for being a debut launched out of nowhere - it briefly hit the #1 spot in hard science fiction on Amazon, was discussed on Huffpost, the Sunday Times and Factor Daily twice. It gave me my first agent (Kanishka Gupta) and publishing deal (with HarperCollins), and was later optioned for film by Endemol Shine.

Behind the Scenes

Numbercaste was my debut novel. Of course I had no idea how to write a novel; I scribbled most of it in Atom (a code editor!) after work, sometimes in the Maradana train station, often late into the night. In the beginning I knew no publishers in Sri Lanka that would publish science fiction, even very near-future work; and I certainly knew nothing about agents and the publishing industry as a whole, so I self-published it via Amazon KDP. The rest came after.

For notes on the process of writing Numbercaste, see here. This note was written immediately after the book was published for the first time; I keep it here as a record of change.

Seeds

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (see The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, By John Hoyles). More prophetic than a lot of work that tops the search lists for prophetic science fiction.
The epic and convoluted history of the Social Credit system in China - including all the increasingly unhinged Western reporting around the subject, but also the results of the pilot projects reported on by journalists in China (especially Wenzhou and Chengdu, which were easier for me to access information on).
Years spent as a journalist and then as a marketer for tech; working on case studies about Experian (one of the world’s largest credit risk agencies) while at WSO2