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The immortal King Rao : a novel / Vauhini Vara.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2022]Edition: First editionDescription: 374 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780393541755
  • 0393541754
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Summary: "Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao--literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena's future is now in the hands of its Shareholders--unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands. Lyrical, satirical, and profound, The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone--peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers--ever get free?"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Dr. James Carlson Library Fiction VARA, VAUHINI Available 33111010653752
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Fiction VARA, VAUHINI Available 33111010829386
Adult Book Adult Book Northport Library Fiction VARA, VAUHINI Available 33111009433711
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life--Athena 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.

"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao--literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena's future is now in the hands of its Shareholders--unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands. Lyrical, satirical, and profound, The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone--peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers--ever get free?"-- Provided by publisher.

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