Justin Pickard reviewed The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara
A Dalit-Bahujan Steve Jobs?
4 stars
Strange hingeing of 20th-century kitchen sink (well, coconut plantation) Indian family drama and post-national (satirical? allegorical?) science fiction. Both parts are memorable anad emotionally compelling, with strongly written characters—but the parallel narratives feel disconnected, disconcerting in their tonal difference; at least until the novel's closing sections.
It proved impossible, too, not to read the narrative against the light and shade of our own recent history; ghosts of Jobs' turtleneck and Musk's Neuralink experiments, factors external to the narrative, but which trouble Vara's efforts to sustain a suspension of disbelief. The plot and ending might have landed better had she not stuck so close to the biographies of our own pantheon of amoral tech titans; a clean cut-and-paste swapping in the tituar King Rao, whose (nationality and caste) difference isn't, it turns out, enough to make a difference.
