Just a note before I begin my review. I finally took up WordPress on their offer of my own domain, which came with the plan I was using. So, if you have a bookmark set to my blog, please change it to https://whatmeread.com. If you have subscribed to my blog by email, I’m sure your email links to the blog will be automatically redirected, and I suspect there are redirects for anyone who types in my old URL.
The timing for me in reading this novel was unfortunate, because I’m not much of a dystopian fiction fan and I had unfortunately read two others recently, accidentally but also because there are so many coming out recently. One of these novels was excellent, though. I read The Immortal King Rao for my Pulitzer Prize project.
In a prison in near-future Seattle, Athena Rao is writing her social profile as proof that she didn’t commit the crime she’s accused of. Athena is the daughter of the disgraced King Rao, a Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg type guy who invented the Coconut—the first computer designed for the general public—and apparently the whole idea of social networking. He was disgraced and adopted a solitary life on an island in Puget Sound until he decided on a further achievement—to create a daughter from his deceased wife’s frozen embryos who is connected from birth to the Internet.
If you’re thinking mad scientist, this isn’t really the emphasis of the novel. Instead, we learn about King Rao’s early life in India and later life in America, we hear what happens when Athena decides to leave home, but we also learn of the disintegration of the world’s governments toward a planet run by an algorithm that is supposed to be fair, and of the immanent threat to the planet of climate change.
There is a lot going on in this novel, a fact that seems to have impressed critics. Personally, I was at first taken by the descriptions of Rao’s childhood in India, but tired of it once it became involved in family disagreements. I wasn’t very interested at all in Rao’s life as a student and then entrepreneur in America. I was most interested in Athena’s story and her attempts for her life to mean something. Although Vara handles everything very well, I think there is too much going on here for me.
whatmeread 
I recently read her short story collection and liked it well enough, but I don’t think I’d seek out this novel.
I wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for one of my projects. Still, my projects have exposed me to a lot of good writing.
I understand why so many authors are reacting to climate change with dystopian novels, but it does all become a bit too much. Who knows? Maybe we’ll survive… 😉
Yes, it seems like everyone is writing a climate change novel lately.