Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

His second novel, The Inhuman Race, is part of a trilogy titled Commonwealth Empires. It is an alternate history narrative set in Sri Lanka, and explores AI, sentience and AI rights in a futuristic world where the British Commonwealth still dominates the Indian subcontinent. It has been noted for subverting philosopher John Searle's chinese room thought experiment and cementing Wijeratne's "status as one of the subcontinent’s science fiction stars". Despite many of these details not being present in the book, Wijeratne has described in detail what the technologies of other nations would look like

Wijeratne's first publication was the independently published The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, which follows a suicidal, near-immortal alcoholic who signs up to be shot into a Ring singularity. Reviews compared it favourably to the work of both Clarke and Douglas Adams. Wijeratne also released Omega Point, a short story invoking French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis of God and marrying it to the Kardashev scale. Since then, he has published in Future Visions and the Expanding Universe anthologies (Dreadnought and Messenger respectively). Messenger, co-authored with American urban fantasy author R.R. Virdi, was listed in the Critters Annual Reader Poll as one of the top ten science fiction stories of 2018 and was a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards.

Wijeratne's debut novel was the independently-published Numbercaste, which garnered critical acclaim in Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi media for its depiction of a near-future world where social influence is quantified and used in lieu of credit - an idea not too different from China's proposed Social Credit systems. Numbercaste has been deemed both a "staggeringly ambitious debut" and a contemplation of the misuse of Big Data, surveillance and class divisions that is both utopian and dystopian at the same time. It led to Wijeratne being lauded by Groundviews as the "first serious voice" in science fiction from Sri Lanka since Arthur C. Clarke. As of 2018, it has been acquired and re-printed by HarperCollins India, and is classified as Econ-SF by the Edgeryders research network.

Wijeratne was nominated for the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

In 2015 he joined WSO2, a middleware corporation headquartered in Colombo, and began working on his debut novel, Numbercaste. During this period, he was perhaps best known in Sri Lanka for the blog he maintained, Icaruswept, which was noted by science writer Nalaka Gunawardene for its data-savvy analyses. Icaruswept garnered a reputation for analyses around social media influence on the Sri Lankan 2015 general election, reporting on the Colombo International Financial City and coverage of the 2017 Sri Lanka floods. While the blog now appears to be defunct, key posts remain mirrored on other publications.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (born November 1992) is a Sri Lankan science fiction author and researcher, best known for Numbercaste and The Inhuman Race. He is classified as part of a new wave of Sri Lankan and South Asian science fiction writers, and his near-future work has been noted for its blend of science, emerging technology and socio-political culture. He is noted locally for being the second Sri Lankan to be nominated for a Nebula Award since Arthur C. Clarke. In 2018, Wijeratne gave a TEDx talk, outlining his roots as a blogger and his philosophy of avoiding homophily and groupthink wherever possible.