Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s Shelfie
In a corner of my study is this shelf. I had originally intended it to hold all the bits and bobs of necessary consumer electronics detritus that tend to build up around me; VR headsets, cameras, boxes of cables, audio gear…
Some of that stuff is still here. But increasingly, it's been turning into what I think of as a working stack. In here are both my novels and the books I keep coming back to because something about them struck me as useful to my own practice.
So I have Tolkien and Le Guin and Frank Herbert (of course). I have Guy Gavriel Kay here. I have James Clavell's Shogun. I have oddities like L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics (fallback career: set up my own cult) and Tielhard de Chardin, whose idea of the noosphere and god-as-a-synthesis directly influenced much of my thinking in The Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines:
Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s The Appearance of Man
I have Yan Lienke's Explosion City Chronicles; I have the Bioshock novelization (Bioshock was a major influence on The Inhuman Race and its sequels). I have a beautiful illustrated edition of Dante's Inferno. Jeff Vandermeer, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Charlie Jane Anders, Lavie Tidhar, James Glieck, Gene Wolfe - there's no formal categorization here other than me visiting them with the mentality of an intellectual magpie: looking for interesting things to ferry back to my own nest.
The corner of the study
A lot of these books are from secondhand bookshops in Colombo or acquired on my travels to various Kinokuniyas. They're devilishly difficult to find in Sri Lanka; most bookstores here are stuffed with either textbooks or the banal nonfiction productivity tips of the day.
Missing here are Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, and PG Wodehouse. I love the Discworld, but this one shelf cannot bear its full weight. Dianna Wynne Jones has haunted me ever since I read the Chrestomanci books and a Tale of Time City as a child (that was my introduction to multiple worlds!). Jeeves and Bertie Wooster hang out in the shelves of the living room, where no doubt they pass their time commenting on the dreary and kipper-less nature of the piles of history books on the next shelf.
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. 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 has several cats who care about none of these things, and he spends most of his time on his homestead in Kandy, Sri Lanka, learning the care and feeding of potato plants.
Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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