Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Sri Lankan science fiction author, programmer, and researcher. His novels - including The Salvage Crew, Numbercaste, and The Inhuman Race - explore AI, power, and post-colonial futures. The Salvage Crew was a Washington Post and Audible bestseller. His short fiction has appeared in Wired, the Big Book of Cyberpunk, and has been commissioned by the Lancet and the Financial Times. He co-founded Watchdog, one of Sri Lanka's leading fact-checking and OSINT operations. He is a Gratiaen Prize winner, Nebula Award nominee, Dangerous Speech Fellow, TEDx speaker, Forbes 30 Under 30, and current Open Society Fellow (2025). He lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

The Salvage Crew 1: The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

A crew of underpaid contractors is sent to a hostile, half-explored world to recover a wrecked UN starship, supervised by an artificial overseer who is unimpressed with the job and with them. It was supposed to be routine salvage. Instead the planet's megafauna, a rival team with far better gear and a dwindling supply of working technology turn the job into a fight to survive and still get paid. Under the adventure, the book is an inquiry into what it means to tell a story, and into who gets to do the telling. It was written with procedural generation tools and GPT-2. It was an Audible and Washington Post bestseller, narrated by Nathan Fillion, and Polygon named it one of the best SF and fantasy books of 2020.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Sri Lanka's busiest SF writer offers up a wide-screen space opera as you've never seen it before! – Lavie Tidhar

 

REVIEWS

  • "A novel of meteoric energy, flaring brighter and brighter as it falls further into its world."

    – Indrapramit Das, Lambda Award-winning author of The Devourers

  • "A classic sci-fi adventure wrapped around a deeply philosophical core."

    – S.B. Divya, Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated author of Machinehood

  • "The Salvage Crew reads like a love letter to science fiction."

    – Gautam Bhatia, Himal Southasian

  • "Space opera for the gig economy."

    – Jaideep Unudurti, The Hindu

  • "Perhaps one of the most riotously intertextual genre novels that exists today . . . To a reader in the know, these easter eggs are tremendous fun . . . it is so clear that Wijeratne is having fun himself–these references are often snuck in as ironic asides, gentle ribbing of the genre's classics."

    – Gautam Bhatia, author of The Wall, writing for Himal Southasian
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

1

I want to make one thing clear: I did not, I repeat NOT, ask for any of this.

I did NOT ask to be promoted.

I did NOT ask to be made Overseer.

And I certainly did not ask to be strapped down in this tin-can body of a drop pod, hurtling down with three idiots screaming their lungs out inside me.

The Company promised me an A-Team. The kind of people Joe Haldeman wrote about in The Forever War. Astrophysicists who could blow a man's head off at five hundred meters. The best of the best—you know, the Master Chiefs and all that. The kind of people who go in, get shit done, leave a nice calling card, and live to strike a heroic pose.

Did we get what it said on the label? Well, let's look around.

Exhibit A: Simon Joosten. Simon is my geologist. He's thirty-five-ish, biological time, and looks like someone stuck eyeballs on a mop. They told me Simon would be reliable—he's good at everything to do with rocks and earthquakes; he's scored well in the shooting sims, can do CPR and basic medical aid, and looks like your average nerd trying too hard to be cool. He'll make a fine crewmember.

But here's what they didn't tell me. Simon grew up on the brutal world of Old New York. He was sold to a corporation as a child. They stuck a needle into the center of his brainstem and jacked him into a virtual fantasy world so they could broadcast his feed as reality TV. His entire childhood was spent being beaten up by gangs and digging holes in fake ground so nobody could hear him crying in the fake darkness—except for the audience, of course, who must have had a hoot, the sick bastards.

Old New York had its times: after the Mercator/Rissek Rebellion, the UN jumped in and did a number on them. Including yanking all those poor souls out of reality TV and setting them free. For some reason, I don't think this man ever really recovered.

I'm not saying Simon is a bad person. I'm saying what doesn't kill you makes you stranger. I'm saying a traumatized reality TV slave-star is the last person I want dropped into an unexplored planet on my first landing mission.

Exhibit B: Anna Agarwal.

Anna is an odd fish. She's got twenty years on Simon. But unlike Simon, Anna grew up with everything she ever wanted. I've checked her degree transcripts. They're through the roof. High social skills. And then somewhere along the line she decided to ditch everything and become an Army doctor.

Doesn't compute. You know why it doesn't compute? Because Anna Agarwal doesn't exist. I don't know who the hell this person is, but the real Anna Agarwal, as verified by her gene sample, died on the microplanet Wayward Child. This imposter, let's call her Fake-Anna, showed up on Arjuna III and has been hopping planets ever since, always moving outwards. Deus Olympus. Boatmurdered. Karthika Highway. This kind of stuff is real easy when delays between databases are measured in light-years. Fake-Anna picked up a gunshot wound somewhere on the way. Left leg. And now she's on my mission, on the very edge of human space.

Right now she's cradling Simon as he screams, which, excuse me, Anna, is the stupidest fucking thing you can do while strapped inside a tin can plummeting through atmosphere. Dammit, Anna. Go back to your seat.

Exhibit C: Milo Kalik. Finally, a sane choice. Milo, thirty-seven, is an inventor. He can shoot, yes, but also make stuff and argue Machiavelli and Chanakya by the fireside. Master's degree in engineering from the Oort Academy. There are some irregularities; he's been demoted three times so far—each time by a woman commander; that's odd. And he's spent a weird amount of time in cryosleep—almost three centuries. But right now I don't have much to go on, so he's my golden boy. Look at him smile. He's enjoying this. He's enjoying being alive after all that time in the freezer. Don't let me down, Milo.

Simon pukes all over him. All over me. Oh, Gods.

This isn't an A-Team. This is a D-Team with a paintjob. The real heroes are probably out somewhere in the Inner Rim, discovering alien civilizations while looking heroic in their armor. Me, I get the backwater planet and the salvage job. Go dig up an old crash site, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

Which brings us to myself.

I'm the drop pod.