"A fully imagined world: propulsive, prophetic, dizzying."
"A brilliant and beautifully written book about capitalism and the patriarchy, about Dalit India and digital America, about power and family and love."
The Observer - Alex Preston
"An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination. Vara's voice is thrilling, original, dynamic and ever-surprising as her characters move from world to world, from the real to the fantastic, examining the myriad contradictory shapes in which love can appear."
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
"An exacting writer of the digital age, journalist Vara makes her debut with a trippy novel that marries the family saga with a biotech satire. … Vara has a gift for humanizing the invisible labor that happens behind our screens. Who, if anyone, can really separate themselves from the digital ties that bind us?"
Vulture - Jessica Jacolbe
"In this richly imagined saga spanning past, present, and future, Vauhini Vara brings us a visionary who makes the world in his image, and the strong-willed daughter whose life could be his final legacy. Vara’s brilliance is matched only by her heart, and this unforgettable debut will challenge what you think you know about genius, capitalism, consciousness, and what it means to be human."
"The Immortal King Rao is an odyssey of the grandest scale, spanning over a century and charting a Dalit immigrant's rise to world power. Vauhini Vara fuses intricate family lore with the history of tech solutionism and capitalist demagoguery, pointing forward to a dangerously likely future of corporate dominion; she writes with the meticulous clarity of a longform journalist, the explosive force of a Trident missile, and the ambition of her own brilliant protagonists."
"Utterly, thrillingly brilliant. From the first unforgettable page to the last, The Immortal King Rao is a form-inventing, genre-exploding triumph. Vauhini Vara’s bravura debut has reshaped my brain and expanded my heart."
"Vara comes out the gate with a masterwork: a book that is three great novels in one–the tale of a thriving and chaotic Dalit clan in the first decades of independent India; an immigrant success story in ’80s America; and a dystopian nightmare of the post-Trump future."
★ 03/28/2022
Technology journalist Vara’s potent debut revolves around a global society run by a corporate board. King Rao, legendary tech mogul and brainchild of the new world order, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving his daughter, Athena, to preserve his legacy. Her first challenge is to prove herself innocent of accusations of conspiring to have him murdered. The Harmonica, an internet-connected device King invented and implanted in Athena’s brain, gives her access to all his memories, and she uses it to relive the traumatic circumstances of her father’s birth in 1950s India, which resulted in his mother’s death; his childhood years spent in the tiny village of Kothapalli before his migration to the U.S.; and his invention of the Coconut, a revolutionary computer that brought about immense global progress and indirectly led to his downfall. Even more pressing than Athena’s need to prove her innocence is her mission to distinguish herself from her father’s legacy and spread the truth about the board’s role in climate change, which leads her to seek out the “Exes”—estranged citizens who have rejected the current model of government. Throughout, Vara ingeniously identifies portentous links between history and the book’s present, such as the parallel Athena draws between the rise and fall of the East India Company with the Shareholder government run by her father. And with King “cursed” at birth, Vara succeeds at making her family portrait the stuff of myth. This is not to be missed. (May)
"Thrilling...Vara has penned a dynamic and haunting world...The Immortal King Rao is a jarring and meticulous critique of how progress is often confused with goodness."
Star Tribune - Anjali Enjeti
"A premonitory, daring book that lands somewhere between speculative fiction and bildungsroman, storytelling and fortune-telling."
"Navigates vastly differing topographies, societies and timelines, with masterful ease that is, paradoxically, astounding...impressive both in its intention and scope...The Immortal King Rao is, without a doubt, literary fiction at its finest."
"A remarkably tender and continually unpredictable story about familial and romantic love, ambition and greed, alienation and revolution, and one man’s unquenchable desire to leave a lasting mark on the world."
"[Vara] brilliantly describes a world that isn’t real but feels like it soon could be."
"Whether exploring the past or near-future, Vara’s keen journalistic skills reveal aspects of post-Independence India, the diasporic immigrant life, tech-driven hierarchies, climate change, and more in ways that prompt questions about our present realities."
"[The Immortal King Rao ] is a nuanced portrayal of a community that rarely appears in novels published by major presses in the West... In Vara’s book, Dalits are not victims, but entrepreneurs, innovators and geniuses."
The New York Times - Alisha Haridasani Gupta
"In this capacious work of imagination, alluringly narrated by King Rao’s daughter Athena, who is accused of his murder, ‘Shareholders’ hold the power to free her as the ecosystem is being destroyed."
"[The Immortal King Rao ] is a monumental achievement: beautiful and brilliant, heartbreaking and wise, but also pitiless, which may be controversial to list among its virtues but is in fact essential to its success. Vara respects her reader and herself too much to yield to the temptation to console us. How rare these days as a reader — and how bracing, in the finest way — to encounter a novel that refuses to treat you like a child or a studio audience. If that were the only thing to love about ‘Rao ,’ it would probably be enough. But as I’ve said, there’s also everything else."
"[Vara] brilliantly describes a world that isn’t real but feels like it soon could be."
"Alternating between Rao’s childhood in a small Indian village, his early student days in the US, and the dystopian society in which Athena has to function, Vara’s original debut delivers challenging and weighty themes with a sure hand."
Booklist (starred review) - Poomina Apte
★ 05/13/2022
DEBUT O. Henry Prize winner Vara (a former technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal ) has written a dystopian debut climate change novel that combines elements of speculative, literary, and historical fiction. In a near-future North America, Athena Rao reckons with the legacy of her father, King Rao, who leads the nation-state-corporation that governs the world through the weaponization of human consumerism and corporate greed. King Rao created Athena through a combination of IVF and quantum computing, embedding in her brain a device that allows her to experience both his long, singular life as well as her own. By viewing her father's memories (his 1950s birth into a modest family of Dalit coconut farmers in India; his meteoric rise as a successful tech CEO; his current seat at the pinnacle of global power), Athena learns how the world got the way it is. She is all too aware of how capably her father's worldwide network and its "Shareholders" can hide unwelcome truths, especially the real status of the runaway climate change that is already destroying the planet—as is apparent to some who are willing to see it. As Athena pulls away from her father and escapes the grasp of his myths and conditioning, she attempts to draw attention to the painful reality of the climate threat, only to become a victim of the all-seeing supranational corporate hegemony he created. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of climate fiction, social engineering sf, and dystopian catastrophe novels.—Marlene Harris
2022-03-16
King Rao is an Indian immigrant of Dalit origins who comes to the U.S. in the 1970s on a graduate school fellowship and finds success in the Seattle-area tech scene. His story could be common enough, but in Vara’s boldly reimagined history, he’s made to embody all such immigrant dreamers, inventing a computer, software, and social network that ultimately dominate the world with an algorithm-run Shareholder Government. Rao and Margaret, his Irish American wife and design partner, become the most successful businesspeople of the last two centuries until an attempt to introduce artificial intelligence into human brains goes awry. The novel is narrated from prison by Rao’s estranged daughter, Athena, who provides details about her father’s origins in India and her own experiences with the resistance, known as the Exes (as in Ex-Shareholders). Vara’s strengths are in her clever wordplay and trenchant observations of an algorithm-led dystopia made up of a highly stratified and inequitable population: tech IP holders, good-looking influencers, and a global worker/servant class. Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop even make an appearance. Some of Vara’s minor characters are less well drawn, though, and the line between satire and stereotype at times grows thin. For example, the sole Vietnamese character is described as having “a subservient expression, this man of at least thirty years, as if he expected the young white cop to pat him on the head”; a female Chinese singer is hypersexualized for a convenient plot point; and there are few women tech entrepreneurs apart from Margaret. However, as Athena and fellow Exes race to awaken Shareholders to the dangers of ignoring the phenomenon known as Hothouse Earth, the reader may realize that the existential threat is not quite as science fictional as it may at first seem.
Even for tech geniuses, climate change may soon be beyond any algorithm’s ability to repair.
