Discussing The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Join CDN researchers in reading and discussing a scifi trilogy exploring AI, literature and consciousness: The Salvage Crew by Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. Please read the first book in the series before the meeting. This is our Defrag Friday for this week, so we will provide popcorn.

CDN has bought ten copies of the first novel in the series and a few of the second and third books (Pilgrim Machines and Choir of Hatred) which can be borrowed from the CDN lounge. The University Library also has a couple of copies of the books that you can borrow. If all copies are currently being read by other people, leave a message on the CDN discord or email Jill (jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no) and hopefully we can switch the books around. 

The Salvage Crew is narrated by Amber Rose 348, a spaceship AI who used to be a human but was digitized when his body wore out. He and his ragtag crew are sent to salvage old spaceship parts from the planet Urmagon Beta, but find more than they expect there, and it turns out that Amber Rose's love of writing poetry (which, given that he is an AI, presumably is AI-generated) gives him a unique advantage in communicating with the alien species they encounter. 

The novel is particularly interesting for people interested in AI and literature both because of its explorations of themes of generated poetry and of AI, language, communication and consciousness, and because Wijeratne used LLMs to generate poetry and to support world-building for the novels.

Wijeratne is visiting Bergen the week after the reading group to keynote the CDN PhD Summer School, so this is a great opportunity to get to know his work before meeting him.