A science fiction novel in Sinhala by the senior journalist Chandana Sooriyabandara. The text is entirely in Sinhala, so a reader will need to be comfortable in the language to follow it; there is no English translation within these covers.
The story is set in a future in which the whole world has fallen under the rule of artificial intelligence, and human feeling and sensibility have been wholly suppressed. What turns the premise is the direction of the rescue: it is the artificial intelligence itself that sets out, in this darkened age, to bring human emotion and humanity back into the world. The escape from a catastrophe made by AI is attempted by AI, which goes looking for the soul the human being has lost. That contradiction holds the book together, and the question it leaves open — what the worth of being human actually consists of — is the one the novel puts to its reader.
It was awarded the State Literary Award for the best original work of youth literature. The category matters for anyone choosing a book for a particular reader: this is writing pitched at a young adult audience, though the material it works with — machine dominance, the erasure of feeling, the recovery of conscience — is handled seriously rather than lightly.
Published by M. D. Gunasena & Co., a long-established Colombo house publishing in Sinhala and English. It will suit Sinhala readers abroad who follow new local fiction, families looking for a contemporary Sinhala novel for a teenage reader, and anyone tracking how Sri Lankan writers are handling artificial intelligence as a subject rather than a prop.
- Author: Chandana Sooriyabandara
- Publisher: M. D. Gunasena & Co. (Pvt) Ltd
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 206
- ISBN: 9789552132803
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