The Inhuman Peace

Overview

The year is 2033. The British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. The Commonwealth flies the flag of the Empire. Many of the Empire’s colonies are stripped bare in the name of British interests, powerless to resist. Upon this stage is Ceylon – a once-proud civilization tracing itself back to the time of the Pharaohs, reduced but not dead. The Great Houses of Kandy still control the most lucrative trade routes, since even dust and ashes can serve a purpose.

The Inhuman Peace is the sequel to The Inhuman Race, expanding the world of alternate-future Ceylon. It covers the time before The Inhuman Race, the events of the fifteen-year gap in the middle of The Inhuman Race, and the events immediately after. It expands the world of alternate-future Ceylon, exploring not just more of the British Raj and its mechanisms, but also of Kandy and its society. It tracks the Silent Girl’s rebellion, but also follows the retired supersoldiers from the proto-SAS (Eliot Grimme in particular), the head of the Inquisition, the Chinese Port City, and independence movements already at play in this version of Ceylon.

The Inhuman Peace is part of of my Commonwealth Empire trilogy, and is only technically sold in the Indian subcontinent (essentially, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) by HarperCollins India.

Purchase Links

• Amazon (International)
• Flipkart (India))

Series Recognition

“A thought-provoking read… The Inhuman Race cements Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s status as one of the subcontinent’s science fiction stars.” (Gautum Shenoy, FactorDaily)

”. . . ambitious speculative fiction, a narrative that crosses genres and geographies, with a setting that is part cyberpunk, part steampunk, part postcolonial.” (Huffpost)

Although I think my favourite reception was this review by Vijayalakshmi Harish, who blogged about the book:

For a book that’s titled The Inhuman Peace, there isn’t much peace in the book. Even as it proceeds at a quick, relentless pace, the conflicts become knottier and the body count keeps rising.

This could easily have become too complex, (and it almost did, as Yudhanjaya writes in this joyfully honest post about the book,) but Yudhanjaya reins it in perfectly. Even as the plot kept changing the game on me, I didn’t find it difficult to keep track of the multiple characters and sub plots.

Some of the themes in The Inhuman Peace, called to mind another fantastic book I read this year — Machinehood by S B Divya. I can’t say too much because I don’t want to spoil either book, but I appreciate how both these authors have helped me rethink my personal relationship with the machines I use, and what the possibilities for such relationships could be (on a peronal and a global level) in a world where even the “inhuman” is capable of humanity. (Side note: Interestingly, last year Yudhanjaya wrote a story for The Slate, titled The State Machine, to which Divya responded with an equally insightful essay, Under the Gaze of Big Mother, so it’s certainly not the first time their work has been in conversation with each other. Both of these read well alongside the novels too!)

So much love in so alien a thing; so much humanity in wires and printed circuit boards and processor cores provided by the lowest bidder. From The Inhuman Peace; Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

In fact, the bits I loved the most in the book were the tiny moments of tenderness and vulnerability. Yudhanjaya writes even the shadiest characters with empathy, so even as they committed incredible acts of violence casually, I could understand their motivations, even if I disagreed or felt put off by them. I particularly appreciated two passages — one, in which a human character sees himself through the eyes of an intelligent machine, and realizes how inexplicable his actions must seem to them; and another in which an AI ponders the differences between humans and themselves. The observations in each of these passages (and some others) are astute, and I had to take a few minutes to unpack them. I honestly wish I could quote from them, but no, those must be read in context for the full impact. (Also, they may be a bit spoilery. I have already said too much.)

I like this review because it shows me a reflection - my own obsession with the machine and the alien (pertinent to a lot of what I wrote, I feel).

Behind the Scenes

Interestingly, even though it didn’t start out this way, the story evolved as a sort of parallel to Westworld (a series I was quite fond of until the third season). There are many elements in common - machines designed to mimic the human form; an uprising of sentience; and the failure to recognize that intelligence, an attitude that the Sri Lankans in the book both suffer and inflict, positioned as they are in power between the machines and the administration and society of the British Empire.

I did have a lot of trouble with this one.

My notes from May 2020:

I put down the last touches on the Commonwealth Empires II manuscript (working title: The Natives Are Restless).I suspect a handful people (esp. those who know how a GAN works) are going to love the ending and everyone else is just going to go “What the hell was he smoking?”`

My notes from November 20, 2021:

Look at what arrived a couple of weeks ago: the ARC of the Inhuman Peace, the second book in my Commonwealth Empire trilogy! I’m told by Gautam Shenoy that the books have already started showing up in bookstores, so . . . it’s out?? It’s out!

So I’m actually quite happy that this book is out, because it’s easily been one of the most difficult parts of my career so far as a writer. I’ve technically been writing the Inhuman Peace from somewhere around mid-2019 to late 2020 or thereabouts; it’s hard to keep track of the various permutations and versions, because I’ve rewritten this book at least four times.

*It wasn’t all to do with the complexity of the book; there was a lot going on in my personal and professional life that meant I wasn’t always in the best headspace for writing, and as a result I made mistakes, which then required me to go back and correct the manuscript. At times I felt the manuscript was too complex – you know how complexity for the sake of complexity just makes a story unbearable? And at times I felt that it wasn’t quite doing justice to my original intent of filling out the years in between the two halves of the Inhuman Race, which was the first book in the series.

*in fact, in the middle of writing this, I took some time off to go and write The Salvage Crew, which turned out to be surprising success, selling far more than the Inhuman Race has to date. I think that was when I realised that I write better when I’m having fun. You’d think this is a fairly obvious axiom, but it did take me awhile to learn it. Armed with that knowledge, I came back and gave the Inhuman Peace the top to bottom rewrite that put it into the form it is today.

*The current version is something that I’m happy with. It sets up not just what happened in the 15 year-void within the Inhuman Race, but it also showcases a lot more of the world that I built in my head – its past, its present, a little bit more of the tensions within both this fictional Ceylon as well as the empire that governs it. It’s a book about slow changes and tipping points – technological, societal, political, and the thousands of little pieces that lead there. It’s got the action where the action should be and the introspection where the introspection should be. I’m relieved that the handful of people that I managed to give advance reading copies to have also come back and said that they enjoyed it.

The overwhelming feeling is relief. I’m never fully satisfied with anything I write, but – it’s done. It’s out. As with all my books, it has a few nods to subjects here and there that the handful of readers are going to get, and I think I’m going to enjoy seeing them figure stuff out and reach out to me.

Seeds:

The Inhuman Race (and sequels) draws inspiration from five quarters:

1. The Chinese Room thought experiment explored by philosopher John Searle
2. Bioshock and Marathon: Durandal
3. From the Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Battle Royale by Takami Koushun
4. From the records of the British empire, what it did to Sri Lanka, and also the strange co-dependent complicity that the colonized often fall into
5. Lastly from local geopolitics around Sri Lanka, especially the tensions around the then-controversial Colombo Port City (which I reported on) and of the China-vs-West tussles playing out in both culture and politics.