The Immortal King Rao

A Novel

Hardcover, 384 pages

English language

Published June 13, 2022 by W.W. Norton & Company.

ISBN:
978-0-393-54175-5
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4 stars (4 reviews)

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 U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the …

1 edition

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.

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