The Inhuman Peace

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.

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, and the events immediately after. It tracks the Silent Girl’s rebellion, but also follows the retired supersoldiers from the proto-SAS, the head of the Inquisition, the Chinese Port City, and independence movements already at play in this version of Ceylon.

Published: November 2021
Publisher: HarperCollins India

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

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

“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… 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… 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.” — Vijayalakshmi Harish

“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.”

Behind the Scenes

Interestingly, even though it didn’t start out this way, the story evolved as a sort of parallel to Westworld — 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.

From my notes in May 2020: I put down the last touches on the Commonwealth Empires II manuscript. I suspect a handful of 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?”

From my notes in November 2021: 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. 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 a surprising success. That was when I realised that I write better when I’m having fun. 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.

Seeds

The Chinese Room thought experiment explored by philosopher John Searle
Bioshock and Marathon: Durandal
Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Battle Royale by Takami Koushun
The records of the British empire, what it did to Sri Lanka, and the strange co-dependent complicity that the colonized often fall into
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