The Immortal King Rao

By: Vauhini Vara

Narrated by: Soneela Nankani

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.

In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion—and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the US to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life—Athena herself.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.

©2022 Vauhini Vara (P)2022 Recorded Books

Great spin on an already interesting trope

SPOILERS ALL: My first exposure to the consciousness-uploaded-to-the-internet trope was in an early episode of the X Files. Agents Mulder and Scully were trying to figure out why the suspect needed T-1 access to the internet, and it took them an entire dial-up episode to suss out the plot to suicide and upload. The obvious next step with that trope is the streaming series Upload, where the afterlife becomes a capitalist hellscape. King Rau’s is an Indian Dalit-to-Silicon Valley-CEO Horatio Alger story, where the subtext is on technology’s and capitalism’s role in not fighting climate change. The narrator, his IVF-borne-by-surrogate-after-her-mother’s-death daughter, tells both his life story and her own, foregrounding permutations of class and economic conflicts in a dizzyingly non-linear fashion. King Rau’s youth, his founding and innovation at a parallel-universe Apple (Coconut in the book), his fall from the top of the digital world, and his upload-type creation and vision is a story of bizarre hope. His daughter’s story of growing up in almost complete isolation with her doting (and eventually senile) father, and her flight to join the Luddites who call themselves “Xs” is interwoven with her father’s. There is an overall darkness to both stories’ inability to deal with the looming extinction of humans due to Hothouse Earth—climate change writ large. Through both stories, vitally important human connections fade to insignificance because Fate awaits. The author mostly avoids the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Picard learns about an extinct civilization by having a single man’s uploaded consciousness dumped into his own head, yet there’s a hint that, after the last page is turned, that’s where the stories may wind up.

Keeps getting better and better as it goes along.

The author tells several stories to piece together the larger narrative of King's life. Each story has its surpises and its 'aha' moments, when you suddenly understand. "Of course!". Each story is a glimps of how humans arrange governance and economics and the consequences of those arrangments. A productive coconut plantation pulls a family from untouchable to landowners, but then changes forever when they vote to divide it's bounty rather than share it together. The tragic consequences are practically narrated by a school teacher turn Maoist as he indoctronates his students
Together these stories paint a picture of our near future. When you finally see the picture, you an 'aha' moment. It's a picture of what the world has/will become. It's plausible and its terrifying.

Excellent story, narration mostly good

Loved the book overall. the narration should have been more authentic with Telugu words.

Waste of time

The ending was incredibly rushed and incredibly bleak. The last hour of so is just a suffer fest. Feels like I wasted my time

very very long

It keeps you invested, partly because the story is ok, but partly because you've gone so far that might as well finish... but it's really neverending. I like long books in general but not so sure I really enjoyed this one. I can see why it won't prizes, it's intricate, but definitely not for just anyone.

Unique perspective

Overall, I enjoyed this dystopian tale. It clearly sent a cautionary message about our society. The main characters weren’t exactly like-able, yet I wanted to try to know them.

Beautifully written, incredibly thought provoking

My book club chose this as our September book, and we all loved it! Sitting under the cover of umbrellas during a rainy Seattle night, we discussed the various themes Vauhini Vara masterfully weaves throughout her debut novel. One of my fellow members grew up in Bainbridge, and I’ve visited Blake Island before—thus giving us the opportunity to better connect with Athena, the main character, as well as many of the cast of characters.

Additionally, Soneela Nankani did a terrific job transforming Vara’s written word into audio.

They did it! they finally did it! Screamed Charlton Heston

This story was eerily similar to what could be possible in the future. Very interesting.

it didn't have a resolution.

it just ended. I thought it was going into another chapter, but then it said the end.

Beautiful Novel

Fast- paced enthralling novel full of lively characters and conflicts. The plot is woven tightly around believable characters oscillating between challenges in rural India to Boston MA, and the Pacific Northwest. Suspenseful and full of twists and turns, love, romance, betrayal and loss. Could not stop until last chapter