Vauhini Vara

Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free?

The Immortal King Rao

Really interesting in the way it unfolds and the world that Vara creates. I wish it had been three short-mid length books in a series vs one mid length book. There’s so many cool ideas that deserve to be fully realized as their own.

Elizabeth

Fascinating plot, writing was too direct sometimes / too expository. I felt like so much of it was backstory / world building / timeline and then I realized I was already 70% of the way through. 

Shohini Gupta

Who are we? Are we our stories? Our memories? Our victories? Our social standing? Our innovations? Our children? How memorable will humanity be in the cosmic scale of things? And the sunsets and the white lace of clouds and every other breathtaking beauty in life? What do they exist for? For what? 

Vauhini Vara is so intimate with King Rao that we know the violent way he slipped into life, his rise as a tech CEO and fall as a god, and every moment of his life in Kothapalli, which he could never relate to his wife but to his daughter through his own invention. In the three weeks I took to read this book, even when I wasn’t reading it, I thought of King Rao — not in his glory but in his soft, vulnerable, unjust moments like the homeless, famished Rao asking a pair of young girls to feed him fish; an old but ageless Rao, sitting in his armchair, with his infant on his chest, as the afternoon light landed on his face; an ancient Rao, clad in his lungi, standing by the sink and eating a bowl of curd rice, without the faculty to realise where his daughter is. 

I read for the grandeur of the plot and the themes but I mostly read for moments like that — images so beautiful that they stay forever in some tight fold of my memory.

Deepika Ramesh

Who are we? Are we our stories? Our memories? Our victories? Our social standing? Our innovations? Our children? How memorable will humanity be in the cosmic scale of things? And the sunsets and the white lace of clouds and every other breathtaking beauty in life? What do they exist for? For what? 

Vauhini Vara is so intimate with King Rao that we know the violent way he slipped into life, his rise as a tech CEO and fall as a god, and every moment of his life in Kothapalli, which he could never relate to his wife but to his daughter through his own invention. In the three weeks I took to read this book, even when I wasn’t reading it, I thought of King Rao — not in his glory but in his soft, vulnerable, unjust moments like the homeless, famished Rao asking a pair of young girls to feed him fish; an old but ageless Rao, sitting in his armchair, with his infant on his chest, as the afternoon light landed on his face; an ancient Rao, clad in his lungi, standing by the sink and eating a bowl of curd rice, without the faculty to realise where his daughter is. 

I read for the grandeur of the plot and the themes but I mostly read for moments like that — images so beautiful that they stay forever in some tight fold of my memory.

An epic yet believable future — dying earth! brain computers! algorithmic society! —blended up with two different historical storylines. Unfortunately the further things drift from the science fiction of it all, the more things lose momentum and purpose. It all comes together in the end, if a bit rushed.

The Immortal King Rao

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