The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne
Published: August 2024 Publisher: Perera Hussein
A collection of short stories written between 2017 and 2022. Many inhabit a shared future world: the same technologies that benefit some characters disenfranchise others, leaving them unable to participate in the economy, or enabling radical state censorship. See William Gibson’s observation that “the future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.”
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The stories have been featured in Slate, Wired, the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, and a special commission by The Lancet and the Financial Times. “The State Machine” appears in Jared Shurin’s Big Book of Cyberpunk.
Contents
- The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne (2017)
- Dreadnought (2017, in The Expanding Universe 3)
- Omega Point (2018)
- The Writing Contest (2018, in Future Visions)
- Deep Ocean Blues (2018, in 2054: An Anthology of the Future)
- Beatnik (2019, in Chronicle Worlds: Crime and Punishment)
- The State Machine (2020, in Slate; republished in the Big Book of Cyberpunk)
- Odysseus (written 2019, previously unpublished; a tribute to the Mars Rover Opportunity and backstory for The Salvage Crew)
- Confessor (2022, in Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Volume 2)
- The Only Good Doctors (2022, commissioned by The Lancet and the Financial Times)
- The Art of the Possible (2022, in Kalicalypse: Subcontinental Science Fiction)
Behind the Scenes
In 2017, I began writing short stories primarily as a method to teach myself the craft. Rather than merely the mechanical task of producing words, I focused on taking ideas, examining them from different angles, and learning to see the stories within. What started with Craig Martelle (the editor of The Expanding Universe) accepting “Dreadnought” in 2018 evolved into a body of work exceeding 80,000 words that found homes in various interesting publications.
In 2023 and 2024, Ameena Hussein began to curate my short stories into one volume. They exist here in paperback form, as a set, for the first time. Living in Sri Lanka, I rarely get to see my short stories in print - so I’m very happy to see them.