Numbercaste

Published: July 2017 Publisher: Amazon KDP (self-published); later republished by HarperCollins India

When Patrick Udo is offered a job at NumberCorp, he packs his bags and goes to the Valley. After all, the 2030s are a difficult time, and jobs are rare. Little does he know that he’s joining one of the most ambitious undertakings of his time or any other. NumberCorp, crunching through vast amounts of social network data, is building a new society - one where everyone’s social circles are examined, their activities quantified, and their importance distilled into the all-powerful Number. A society where the artist is as important as the billionaire. Where those with influence are rewarded, and those without, punished.

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Numbercaste was Yudhanjaya’s debut novel - briefly hitting #1 in hard science fiction on Amazon, discussed in Huffpost, the Sunday Times, and Factor Daily. It led to his first literary agent (Kanishka Gupta), a publishing deal with HarperCollins India, and a film option by Endemol Shine.

“… a staggeringly ambitious novel. Little eludes Wijeratne’s gaze as he grapples with the implications of emerging technologies, socio-cultural phenomena and political movements.” - Smriti Daniel, the Sunday Times

“I cannot tell you enough how impressive this is.” - Navin Weeraratne, author of The Hundred-Gram Mission

“In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s book we may have the beginnings of truly South Asian science fiction, not limited to the quaint and the exotic. His writing engages self-confidently with the reality of people whose roots are here, but whose imaginations, ambitions and domains are not limited either by geography or the globe-straddling corporations they create or shape.” - Rohan Samarajiva, the Daily Star

Behind the Scenes

Numbercaste was my debut novel. Of course I had no idea how to write a novel; I scribbled most of it in Atom (a code editor!) after work, sometimes in the Maradana train station, often late into the night. In the beginning I knew no publishers in Sri Lanka that would publish science fiction, even very near-future work; and I certainly knew nothing about agents and the publishing industry as a whole, so I self-published it via Amazon KDP. The rest came after.

For notes on the process of writing Numbercaste, see here.

Seeds

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (see The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, by John Hoyles). More prophetic than a lot of work that tops the search lists for prophetic science fiction.
The epic and convoluted history of the Social Credit system in China - including all the increasingly unhinged Western reporting around the subject, but also the results of the pilot projects reported on by journalists in China (especially Wenzhou and Chengdu, which were easier for me to access information on).
Years spent as a journalist and then as a marketer for tech; working on case studies about Experian (one of the world’s largest credit risk agencies) while at WSO2.