Pilgrim Machines
Humanity has spread to the stars. For the first time in thousands of years, we have also discovered the Other - an alien 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 look for answers. To go where no human has ever gone before.
- Published: September 2024
- Publisher: Aethon Books
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Pilgrim Machines inherited something from the success of The Salvage Crew, but didn’t make as big a splash on launch. It has 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 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
“Powerful. Compelling. Engaging. Awe-Inspiring.” - Lawrence M. Schoen, award-winning author of the Barsk novels
“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… Highly recommended for fans of 3body problem, Culture, Tchaikovsky, Haldeman.” - u/Voice_of_Morgulduin, r/printSF
Behind the Scenes
Pilgrim Machines took a while. The TL;DR version is that this was me chasing that feeling I got from works by Clarke, Stapledon, and Lem - the awe and wonder of the cosmos shared, in my mind, by games like 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. 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.
Over its rewrites, it also gave me a kind of conceptual clarity about what I wanted to do 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 party ended. They went along with my request for the Buddhabrot on the cover, and Peter Berkrot did a fantastic job on the audiobook.