Fiction

Wijeratne's first publication was the self-published The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne,^[13] 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.^[20] Wijeratne followed with his first novel, Numbercaste,^[10] deemed a "staggeringly ambitious debut"^[21] that garnered critical acclaim in South Asia^[22][23][10] for its blend of emerging technology and socio-political critique. It led to Wijeratne being lauded by Groundviews as the "first serious voice" in science fiction from Sri Lanka since Arthur C. Clarke,^[24] and is classified as Econ-SF by the Edgeryders research network.

In 2018, Wijeratne was the recipient of a four-book deal by HarperCollins,^[25] noted by the Sunday Times as the largest deal, in terms of books, ever offered to a Sri Lankan author;^[26] Numbercaste was among those four books, and saw its film options acquired by Endemol Shine.^[27] Wijeratne subsequently self-published Omega Point, a short story invoking French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis of God and marrying it to the Kardashev scale.^[23]

His second novel, The Inhuman Race ^[28] 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".^[29]

Since then, he has published in a number of anthologies. 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^[30] and was a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards.^[31] Alongside J.T. Lawrence, Jason Werbeloff and Colby Rice, Wijeratne also launched 2054,^[26][32] a shared-world cyberpunk anthology foreworded by physicist, poet and Future Chronicles editor Samuel Peralta.^[33] Wijeratne has one known comics project, a 4-page short titled Genesis.^[34]

In 2020, Slate.com published The State Machine^[35] under its Future Tense program, and Wired published Work Ethics.^[36] Both stories explore themes of human-AI collaboration; one from the perspective of governance and the other examining the future of work. Both betray a fascination, and support for a collaborative future, something Wijeratne references in interviews and blogposts. Subsequent tinkerings with OpenAI GPT-2 led him to explore generated poetry^[37] and attempt to create a novel by co-writing with procedural generation tools that he had written and with GPT-2.^[38] The result was Wijeratne's The Salvage Crew, published in 2020. Narrated by Nathan Fillion;^[39] it became a bestseller on Audible^[40] and was selected by Polygon as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2020.^[3]

Nonfiction and activism

Wijeratne then joined LIRNEasia as a researcher, where his work involved the analysis of communities on social media,^[41] misinformation and hate speech^[42][43] and bot networks.^[44][45] He has since discussed the moderation of terrorist and violent content online at the Internet Governance Forum^[46] and avenues such as ForeignPolicy.^[47] Much of his activism in this field consists of pushing social media platforms to acknowledge the computational and human process limitations of content moderation in low-resource languages, and in pushing Facebook et al. to share data and work with local researchers.^[48][49]

In 2018, Wijeratne gave a TEDx talk, outlining his roots as a blogger and his philosophy of avoiding homophily and groupthink wherever possible.^[50] In 2019, Wijeratne co-founded Watchdog, a fact-checker.^[6][7] In sessions hosted by NATO Stratcom COE, Wijeratne outlined its growth and operation.^[51]

In 2020, Wijeratne contributed to the Goethe-Institut's Day-Afterthoughts project,^[52] which curated responses to COVID-19 times from artists and intellectuals around the world.