Vauhini Vara

Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free?

The Immortal King Rao

From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Foreign Policy, Bustle, Alta, Ms. Magazine, Cultured, Denizen, The Millions, Lit Hub, Book Riot, and Electric Literature

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that not only could communicate but also could do all kinds of other activities, and better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her—from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen to using social media as The Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporate financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.


Selfhood in the Digital Age

Searches

Stories

This Is Salvaged

Named a most anticipated book of the year by Literary Hub, Electric Literature and The Millions A Best Book of Fall 2023 by Bustle. Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

This Is Salvaged: Stories

"A fully imagined world: propulsive, prophetic, dizzying" - Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women "An astonishing debut. An amazing imagination" - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Last Queen "A masterwork-a book that is three great novels in one" - Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government. 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 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.

A Novel

One of Vulture's Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022 One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2022 One of The Observer's Fiction to Look Out for in 2022 One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A Times of India Most Anticipated Book of 2022 In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government. 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.

The Immortal King Rao: A Novel

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbour or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbour, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

This is Salvaged

'A brilliant and beautifully written book about capitalism and the patriarchy, about Dalit India and digital America, about power and family and love' Alex Preston, Observer, 'Fiction to look out for in 2022' Vauhini Vara's lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel begins in India in the 1950s, following a young man born into a Dalit family of coconut farmers in a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. King Rao, as he comes to be known, later moves to the US, where he studies in Seattle, meeting the love of his life and his business partner, the smart and self-assured Margie. King Rao ultimately rises up through Silicon Valley to become the most famous tech CEO in the world and the leader of a powerful, corporate-owned global government. Yet he ultimately ends up living on a remote island off the coast of Washington state, an exile from the world which he has helped build. There, in a beautiful home on an otherwise deserted island, he brings up his brilliant daughter, Athena. Shielded from the world's glances, in many ways she has an idyllic childhood, but she will be forced to reexamine her father's past and take steps to try to decide her own future. She is unlike other girls, and she will find the outside world much more hostile than her father did when he left the coconut grove he called home. A profound and moving novel about technology, consciousness and revolution, The Immortal King Rao asks how we build the worlds in which we live, and whether we ever have the power to leave them?

Vauhini Vara

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