The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne

In this collection of super charged, original and mind bending short stories of science fiction, award winning writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne takes us to new heights. Featuring dystopia, post apocalypse, time travel, robots and more, this brilliant collection brings together an eclectic range of stories that manage to reflect the current Sri Lankan social and political environment while delving deep into the emotional and physical connections that explore other worlds, cultures and timelines.

In 2017 I began to write short stories. Publication was a secondary objective; the real reason was to teach myself how to write. I don’t mean the mechanical task of sitting down and cranking out words – rather, I refer here to the act of taking an idea, stretching it and examining it from different directions, learning to see the story within. What started with Craig Martelle (the editor of The Expanding Universe) accepting Dreadnought in 2018 ended up with stories placed in a body of work (a little over 80,000 words) that had quietly racked up over time, ending up in some very interesting publications.

• The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne (Published 2017, on Amazon)
• Dreadnought (Published 2017, in The Expanding Universe 3)
• Omega Point (Published 2018, on Amazon)
• The Writing Contest (Published 2018, in Future Visions)
• Deep Ocean Blues (Published 2018, in 2054: An Anthology of the Future)
• Beatnik (Published 2019 in Chronicle Worlds: Crime and Punishment)
• The State Machine (Published 2020, in Slate)
• Odysseus (Never published except on my website. Written 2019-ish as a tribute to the Mars Rover Opportunity, and also to flesh out a little bit of backstory for the Salvage Crew)
• Confessor (Published 2022 in the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Volume 2)
• The Only Good Doctors (Published 2022 by the Lancet and the Financial Times Commission)
• The Art of the Possible (Published 2022 in Kalicalypse: Subcontinental Science Fiction - Fantascienza dal subcontinente)

Some of these stories happen broadly in the same world, in the same future. The Writing Contest, Deep Ocean Blues, Beatnik, Work Ethics, The Only Good Doctors, Those Left Behind, The Tyranny of Water, Guardian Demons, Confessor – these happen broadly in the same world, at slightly different times.

Often, they show different sides of the same trend; the technologies that the protagonist of the Writing Contest rails at are the same technologies that allow Romesh to keep his job in Work Ethics or for the better-off Malithi to be diagnosed in The Only Good Doctors. This are also the same technological drive that disenfranchises people in Those Left Behind, leaving them unable to participate in an economy; and it is the same drive that allows the radical state censorship of the Guardian Demons. The future, to quote William Gibson, is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.

Other stories are distinct and apart. When I began writing, I wrote stories that did not necessarily need to connect – and the last story in this anthology leans towards that old freedom, even indulging in parody. Some trees grow anywhere.

For the first time, they are collected here, in one print volume, published by Perera Hussein. It’s also the first time my work has been available in print from a local publisher in my native Sri Lanka, so I’m very happy to have this out there.