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IMMORTAL KING RAO, by Vauhini Vara

The premise of Vauhini Vara’s first novel, “Immortal King Rao,” is as simple as it gets: a young woman named Athena, who was secretly raised on an island in Puget Sound by an aging father who injected her with the genetic code. Allowing her to access the entire internet and all her memories, she finds herself in a prison named after her mother, awaiting trial by the algorithm for a crime she insists she didn’t commit. While we wait, the US government writes a lengthy self-defense addressed to the Shareholders of the mega-corporation that actually replaces all governments, just as “shareholder” replaces the capitalized “s” with the word “citizen”.

Let me try again. The premise of “Immortal King Rao” is as simple as it gets: A boy named King Rao is born into a large Dalit Indian family who has earned a place in the middle class by making a cunning investment in a coconut farm. King is sent to study engineering in the United States; here he becomes the chief programmer and public face of an early computer company that has eclipsed Gates, Jobs and others, becoming the global superpower of a lifestyle brand that has become a lifestyle brand. After being prominently disgraced, King retreats to a small island where his daughter Athena plays Miranda to her Prospero: ward, porter, secret sharer. He hopes for a day when he can right the wrongs he has committed and the wrongs he thinks have been done against him.

Once again, with emotion. The premise of “Immortal King Rao” is as simple as it gets: The endgame of climate collapse, a phenomenon called Hothouse Earth, is slowly extinguishing human civilization and possibly all life on the planet. But this idea is too big and scary for anyone to deal with, so they don’t. Shareholder Government continues to use Social Capital ratings to keep its Shareholders working, consuming and publishing. Meanwhile, in the Blanklands – officially recognized autonomous regions beyond the control of the Shareholders – people who call themselves Exes have achieved something like functional anarcho-communism, like Proudhon’s workers’ collectives. Exes believes that as the contradictions inherent in the Shareholder system become harder to ignore, more people will adopt their model. Unfortunately, when everyone returns to their city on a hill, there is a good chance that the hill will be flooded.

The 370-page “Rao” falls short for a multi-generational family epic and a comprehensive social epic. (Not to mention sci-fi, but a novel is sci-fi only insofar as it includes some fictional science.) Let’s say Jonathan Franzen’s “fixes”, Mira Jacob’s “Sleepwalker’s Dance Guide” or Min Jin Lee’s “pachinko” – don’t say anything about older, more sleazy monsters likeA Fit Man” or “Independent People” – “Rao” At first it may seem like a middleweight among heavyweights. Don’t be fooled.