Pilgrim Machines

Overview

Humanity has spread to the stars…

For the first time in thousands of years, we have also discovered the Other. The alien. A being so unimaginably complex that it makes us all look like children.

The PCS Blue Cherry Blossom, a long range interstellar freighter, is tasked with the ultimate voyage. What lies at the heart of the galaxy? Who and what is out there? Is it even possible to survive?

Against a backdrop of relentless political and corporate maneuvering, a new crew sets out, prepared to risk their lives and their deaths to set forth into the void and look for answers. To go where no human has ever gone before.

And thus begins a new space odyssey.

Set in the world of the Salvage Crew by award winning writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Pilgrim Machines is perfect for fans of We Are Legion, Battlestar Galactica, Murderbot, Blindsight and Star Maker. The audiobook is narrated by Peter Berkrot.

Purchase Links

• Amazon (International)
• Audible (International)
• Bookshop (US)

Accolades and Recognition

Pilgrim Machines inherited something from the success of the Salvage Crew, but didn’t make as big a splash on launch. It’s slowly picked up over time.

“A journey about enlightenment, about discovery for the sake of discovery and transcendence for the sake of becoming better aware of our existence.. . Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel Pilgrim Machines is a everything I think of when I try and imagine what science fiction can and should be: an optimistic and beautiful journey into the cosmos that tells us something about ourselves.” - Andrew Liptak, author of Transfer Orbit and Cosplay: A History

“Powerful. Compelling. Engaging. Awe-Inspiring.” - Lawrence M. Schoen, award-winning author of the Barsk novels and founder of the Klingon Language Institute

“If you mixed the intellectual heft and inquisition of Arthur C Clarke with a slightly boozy raconteur on a Friday night, albeit one armed with the fountain of all human (or otherwise) knowledge, it would probably sound something like Pilgrim Machines.” - Thomas Trang, author of Dark Neon Dirt

“Really excellent book, feels like the next book in the Culture Series, but a bit grungier and less hopeful. One of those space odysseys with mind numbing size and distances. Very melancholy and haunting. Calls into question the meaning and purpose of humanity, and the definition of self. Has me feeling some type of way. Many sections where I had to just stop and mull over what I’ve just read.

Highly recommended for fans of 3body problem, Culture, Tchaikovsky, Haldeman.” - a review seen in passing on r/printSF, by u/Voice_of_Morgulduin

Behind the Scenes

Pilgrim Machines took a while. I have its foreword here , but the TL;DR version is that this was me chasing that feeling I got from some works by Clarke, Stapledon and Lem - the sort of awe and wonder of the cosmos that is shared, in my mind, by games like the Outer Wilds and No Man’s Sky.

The end result is special to me. Partly because, up until that point, it was the purest condensation of many of the things that fascinate me. Partly because it was a return to the loving abandon with which I wrote some of my early short stories, like The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne and Omega Point. Partly because, after 2021 and the terrifyingly all-encompassing nature of Watchdog, I needed to know whether I could still write fiction, and Pilgrim proved to me that I could.

And partly, I think, because over its rewrites, it gave me a kind of conceptual clarity of what I wanted to do, especially in the Salvage Crew universe; the kind of dark mirror I wanted to hold up to Banks’ Culture (which I love and respect tremendously).

To their credit, Aethon let me cook; it isn’t every publisher who lets you show up with a sequel four years after the Salvage Crew party ended. They even went along with my request for the Buddhabrot on the cover, and Peter Berkrot did a fantastic job on the audiobook; great stuff, as they say, and something I can genuinely be proud of.