
- Publisher:
- PENGUIN
- Year of publication:
- 2023
- ISBN:
- 978-1-324-05030-8
- Pages:
- 384
THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
A NOVEL
VAUHINI VARA
In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, Kings daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacyliterally, 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 communionand so she sets out to tell the truth to the worlds Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about Kings 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 world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his lifeAthena 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.