Start Here
New to the work? Here are three ways in, depending on what you’re after.
If you want space opera with something strange underneath
Start with The Salvage Crew.
A stranded salvage crew. An AI with literary pretensions. A dead world that might not be entirely dead. It reads fast, it hits hard, and it’s probably the best entry point to understand what I’m trying to do with fiction - the procedural generation, the AI-as-narrator experiment, the way the technology and the story bleed into each other.
If you enjoy it, continue with Pilgrim Machines and then Choir of Hatred.
If you want something that hits closer to home
Start with Numbercaste.
A near-future Sri Lanka where a Silicon Valley startup is building a social credit system - not for a government, but for a global financial product. It was written before the age of social media scoring became a real policy conversation, and some of it has aged uncomfortably well.
It’s the most grounded of my novels: recognisable cities, recognisable anxieties, technology you can almost touch.
If you want to start small
Start with the essays.
The Ricepunk Manifesto is the clearest statement of where I’m coming from aesthetically - tropical science fiction, post-colonial futures, technology as it’s actually experienced outside the global north.
The Steam Hammer is a speech about AI and what it means to make things in the age of thinking machines. Short, pointed, delivered at the Arthur C. Clarke centennial.
The Fate of the Gorillas is the most recent long essay - on superintelligence, the limits of our frameworks for thinking about it, and what we might be missing.
If you want a short story first
Two stories are freely readable online and work as standalone entries:
Work Ethics (Wired, 2020) - a near-future story about labour, gig economy, and what it means to work alongside machines. Short and pointed.
The State Machine (Slate / Future Tense, 2020) - later collected in the Big Book of Cyberpunk (Vintage/Penguin Random House) and The Slow Sad Suicide and Other Stories (Perera Hussein). A story about bureaucracy, identity, and the systems that govern lives.
For the full list, see Short Fiction.
The full map
- Books - all novels and anthologies, organised by series
- Short Fiction - stories in magazines and anthologies
- Posts - nonfiction, talks, and long-form thinking
- Software - tools I’ve built
- Experiments - projects that don’t fit elsewhere