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 3 - Choir of Hatred by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

The Rubber Ducks are a catering company - on paper. In practice, they're one of the deadliest mercenary outfits left after the UN-ORCA, led by an AI whose memories nobody wants to question too closely. The question is: where lies the line between killing others and killing yourself?

Choir of Hatred is not a sequel to Pilgrim Machines. It covers events that led to the conditions of The Salvage Crew, and it as with all the Salvage Crew books, it can be read as a standalone.

 

REVIEWS

  • "It's rare to see a work of military science fiction that grasps what a threat bad logistics and the sheer size and scope of space poses upon any military action . . . there's a clever, dark sense of humor that enjoys a slow burn throughout the novel. To meld that and the horror elements throughout Choir of Hatred takes a deftness of hand I can't help but salute. Military science fiction has seen scores of mercenary bands and hardened units facing long odds over the years, but rarely do they ever look like this, or offer a tale as intriguingly told as Choir of Hatred. Even by the already impressive standards of the prior Salvage Crew novels, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne has found a way to bring a unique perspective and execution to a classic formula that should appeal to all tastes."

    – Sean CW Korsgaard, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Vol. XCV
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

It used to be that people lived for just the right amount of time. Just enough time for a rebellious youth; just enough time for a midlife crisis; just enough time to fade into oblivion with your regrets.

Eighty years, give or take a decade. That was the time allotted to us. And it was nothing. Think about it. The sun takes two hundred and thirty million years to complete its orbit around the Milky Way. And that, as far as our universe goes, is a fairly pedestrian act. Just a ball of gas going there and back again. Bookies on the Pillar of Heaven take thirty-to-one odds as to whether we as a species will last that long. Sucker's bet.

Most people were halfway through their lives before they even figured out who they were. And then it was a race to the bottom.

The upside is that this shortness of breath always inspired a tremendous search for meaning. Especially as people got older. What is this life for? we asked. We were all born to die. Surely the universe didn't make us just to throw us into a few brief decades of drudgery before we ended up being shot into a star or liquified into plant-food. Surely we weren't just meat-puppets thrusting our hips into the void. We think, we breathe, we argue, we introspect; surely this had to mean something. Prophets, wise-men, cave-dwelling monks; paintings, poems, performance art; hieroglyphs, steles, blogposts, distributed censuses, meltdowns on livestreams. So much energy, so much time, so much talent spent on this question.

Take all those philosophers. Remove all their flesh. Put their minds into metal tubs that can stand the thousand cruelties of space. Make it so that they can live a hundred, two hundred, even a thousand years, if they so choose, and if they maintain themselves. Take away the very concept of a lifespan and replace it with the choice to keep on going. Show them the true scale of the universe.

The question vanishes. All that's left is certainty. We clock in, we clock out, and the universe does not care. We are a crawling mass of nothing. In the grand scheme of things, we're just an errant configuration of matter. Objects that make more objects; a universe trying out new shapes just for the heck of it. Everything we are will one day be dust. And the only things that make this road worth walking are the people who walk with you. There's a reason so much of life advice is about finding good friends and partners. An hour of banter; a day of mutual frustration; laughter over a week of bad meals; the relief of a tough job well done after months; the slow suicide of the years, made slightly less sad because we exist together, we share it with each other. Small bloody payment for all this hassle, but it's the only thing we really get. Everything in between is us trying to stay busy.

My chosen form of busyness? War.