A dark space adventure with a dash of Wittgenstein in it. Features: depressed, C-team crew, a bored-as-fuck AI poet, an actual alien AI, first contact, giant furry sloths. It's also a love letter to Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress.
The AI poet was an actual AI poet: see OSUN / The Poetry Machine. The Salvage Crew became an Audible and Washington Post bestseller and made The Earthbag Homestead feasible.
The Salvage Crew was a technical step forward for me in exploring my human+AI thesis; for this book, the voice of the machine poet was a GPT-117M that I retrained (see OSUN/The Poetry Machine); the galaxy and the planet were generated by bits of code; and so were the characters and quite a few of the events, including weather. Here’s the Foreword, which explains it all.
I’ve since explored possible AI+human directions on Slate, Wired, and for Google Research.
02/01/2022
Some interesting reviews for the Salvage Crew here. Overall: pretty happy that people have picked up what I laid down.
https://www.thehindu.com/books/let-there-be-urmagon-beta-jaideep-unudurti-reviews-the-salvage-crew-by-yudhanjaya-wijeratne/article34168113.ece
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-salvage-crew-by-yudhanjaya-wijeratne/
https://mithilareview.com/review-yudhanjaya-wijeratnes-the-salvage-crew/
https://religionnews.com/2021/02/17/the-salvage-crew-buddhist-artificial-intelligence-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-audibi-poetry/
11/02/2021:
10/12/2020:
From this comment I made on Reddit on a post about the Salvage Crew:
Thanks for reading! I consider it to be a standalone, but the story of contact is not yet over.