The Salvage Crew

A salvage crew and their AI overseer arrive on a remote planet to retrieve an abandoned UN starship. What should be a routine job falls apart immediately: the planet is inhabited, a rival crew is closing in, and the AI - narrating in verse, tracing the spirals of a neo-Buddhist past - is having something like an existential crisis.

  • Published: October 2020
  • Publisher: Aethon Books

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Narrated in the audiobook by Nathan Fillion, The Salvage Crew became an Audible and Washington Post bestseller, was recognized by Polygon as one of the best SFF books of 2020, and has been featured in Himal SouthAsian, Strange Horizons, the Hindu, and Religion News, among others.

“A novel of meteoric energy, flaring brighter and brighter as it falls further into its world.” - Indrapamit Das, author of The Devourers

“…perhaps one of the most riotously intertextual genre novels today: Wijeratne is in conversation not merely with the themes of global SF, but with its practitioners as well.- Gautam Bhatia, Himal SouthAsian

“Wijeratne spins together a fabulous space adventure that takes an unexpected turn into the philosophical as his characters are forced to confront what it means to be human, and what intelligence beyond Earth might look like.” - Andrew Liptak, Polygon.com

“A classic sci-fi adventure wrapped around a deeply philosophical core. With skillful plotting, interesting details, and a motley crew of humans and A.I., it’s a story that embraces its meta-origins…with an ending worth waiting for.” - S.B. Divya, Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated author of Runtime and Machinehood

Behind the Scenes

The Salvage Crew is a dark, snarky space adventure blending Wittgenstein and Buddhism, featuring a depressed C-team crew, a bored AI poet, alien contact, giant furry sloths, and gig-economy capitalism.

The novel is also a technical step forward in exploring a human+AI thesis; it happens through the perspective of a machine poet, and sets the stage for the rest of the series, and the writing of it involved many systems and experiments.

Drawing from procedural generation, I generated the galaxy, planet, characters, and events using code (available on Github), with the AI poet’s voice created by retraining an OpenAI GPT-117M model on Tang dynasty poetry translations. I functioned as a rudimentary cyborg, sifting through thousands of generated poems to find those balancing story utility with the subtle disconnect of style and translation.

I’ve documented this process in detail in the foreword. I’ve since explored possible AI+human directions on Slate, Wired, and for Google Research.

Seeds

  1. OSUN / The Poetry Machine
  2. RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress; especially stories that rose from them, like Bogdan’s Rest by Nate Crowley and Boatmurdered.
  3. Phet Sayo remarking ‘The Internet is real, but not actual,’ at a conference in Mozambique, which led me stumbling down the Tractacus
  4. The BOLO series, by Keith Laumer and others
  5. Peter Watt’s Blindsight, especially the moments where Theseus and Rorshach are in conversation
  6. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, as in the Tarkowski version

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To get in touch, reach out to hello [at] yudhanjaya [dot] com, or contact finegan [at] zenoagency [dot] com to talk to my agent (Stevie Finegan). Responses from my end may take time.

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