The Immortal King Rao: A NovelFinalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 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. |
Contents
Section 17 | |
Section 18 | |
Section 19 | |
Section 20 | |
Section 21 | |
Section 22 | |
Section 23 | |
Section 24 | |
Section 9 | |
Section 10 | |
Section 11 | |
Section 12 | |
Section 13 | |
Section 14 | |
Section 15 | |
Section 16 | |
Section 25 | |
Section 26 | |
Section 27 | |
Section 28 | |
Section 29 | |
Section 30 | |
Section 31 | |