THE IMMORTAL KING RAO

A debut novel rewrites the history of big tech into a mythic immigrant story of dystopian proportions.

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.