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Journalist Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, takes us to a dark future where humans are “Shareholders” governed by a global corporation. Decisions are made not by human heads of state, but through a master algorithm called Algo. There is no longer a need for currency, as Shareholders’ labor is evaluated by Algo and compensated by Social Capital. The luckiest among the Shareholders are born with the most privilege, and the only thing that can help the unluckiest climb social strata is to become wildly successful influencers.
Taking us on this journey through an uncomfortably believable dystopian future is a teenager named Athena, daughter of the Indian-American immigrant who originally invented Algo to improve and optimize the human and commercial connections between people. Though King Rao didn’t create the technology with malicious intentions, its impact on humans has transformed the world into a hyper-capitalist society, one that is doing too little to reverse extreme climate change. When Athena learns the harm her parents’ company has caused in the world, she sets out to save humanity. Fortunately she has one advantage–the most powerful technology King developed lodged in her brain. Using it, she takes us through his life from his boyhood on a humble coconut plantation in India, to inventing the first personal computer for mass consumption, to living among the anarchist rebels who set out to end the empire he built.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Vara on her genre-transcending novel.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Devi Bhaduri
You have covered technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Wired. How does your journalistic background inform your novel? What was it like moving from journalism to fiction?
Vauhini Vara
I’ve written both fiction and nonfiction for as long as I’ve been a writer. In college, I worked at my college newspaper and interned at other newspapers over the summer, while also minoring in creative writing. But for years, the two genres—fiction and nonfiction—felt like totally separate vocations. Right after graduating college, I got a reporting job writing about technology companies for The Wall Street Journal. I’d go to work doing that by day, and then would write fiction at night and on weekends, sharing the work with my writing group from college. After three years of that, I decided to take a leave of absence to study fiction at Iowa Writers Workshop. I’d loved being a reporter, but something about spending all my time on creative work was incredibly freeing. It was then—in my second year of graduate school, in 2009—that I started The Immortal King Rao. I’d thought I was going to graduate school to escape from the real world that I’d been writing about in my day job and was surprised to find myself still thinking about those tech companies I’d covered, Facebook and Oracle and so on. Fiction ended up being a vehicle through which I could explore certain future-oriented questions about tech and society without having to stick strictly to the facts of what was happening in the real world at the time.
Devi Bhaduri
At seventeen, Athena runs away from home only to find herself dependent on a group of revolutionaries trying to bring down her parents’ company while hiding her identity from them. What a fascinating position for her to be in! When did you know that Athena would be the right person to tell this story?
Vauhini Vara
My dad gave me the idea for this novel—well, for the part where King Rao is growing up on a coconut grove in South India. That coconut grove and King’s childhood there are based on my dad’s childhood in a village in the state of Andhra Pradesh, called Tottaramudi. But while I visited Tottaramudi several times as a child and young adult, I’d never lived there, and I definitely had no firsthand knowledge of what it was like to grow up in a place like that, as a Dalit, in the 1950s. So, it felt daunting to try to write from the perspective of King himself. Around the time that I was thinking about this, my now-husband and I were watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot (which ran from 2004-09), where there are these androids called Cylons who had digital consciousnesses. And all of a sudden, pretty early on in the writing, it occurred to me that a character like that—someone with the capacity to connect with King’s consciousness but not actually be him—would be the ideal narrator for my book. I knew thate King was going to move to the U.S. and become a tech entrepreneur, and it all just clicked together: Athena would have to be his daughter, and she’d have to be endowed with some special access to his consciousness.
Devi Bhaduri
King Rao invents the Coconut computer. I must admit how much I enjoyed the name “Coconut,” imagining what could’ve been an alternate history to the birth of the Apple computer. How much of the actual history of the invention of personal computers inspired and informed your writing around King’s Coconut computer, and how he and his wife Margie founded the Coconut Corporation?
Vauhini Vara
When I started writing about tech companies for The Wall Street Journal, my first beat was to cover Oracle, which had been founded in the 1970s by Larry Ellison. I read a lot about that period when I was starting to write about Oracle—there’s this particular book I remember reading with a great title, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison—and then as I continued to cover tech and, later, to write this novel, I read biographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as well. I also read some oral histories and other documents about what that time was like. All that research played a big role in shaping King and the Coconut Corporation, but then there were aspects of my fictional story that had to be completely invented, too. Ellison, Gates and Jobs are all white men, of course, and the mythology of their companies’ founding is that they did it largely on their own, maybe with the help of a sidekick, another white man. King is not only an Indian immigrant, he’s Dalit as well—from a marginalized group within a marginalized group—and it felt important for that to play a big role in his experience not only in India but in trying to start a company in the U.S. in the 1970s. And then, because this is fiction, I got to invent a complex female co-founder as well.
Devi Bhaduri
It’s refreshing to see Americans from the point of view of a new immigrant, in this case, an Indian immigrant who is trying to assimilate while also retaining his identity, particularly in contrast to Margie’s domestic, white Americanness. Watching them learn about one another was charming, as when Margie asked King what his name meant, and he answered, “A king is the ruler of a place”! Were you able to draw from personal experiences when creating their life’s cultural melting pot?
Vauhini Vara
I was born in Canada and raised there until I was 10. I remember moving to the U.S., to a suburb of Oklahoma City, before the sixth grade, and finding some aspects of American culture pretty strange, including the pervasiveness of people’s sense of American exceptionalism (maybe especially in a place like Oklahoma). So, King’s experience, coming to the U.S., is certainly informed partly by that. It’s also informed by the experiences of my Indian friends and relatives who came here in their teens or twenties. My mom had lots of stories about that when I was growing up. While my parents are both Indian, I know a lot of people in cross-cultural marriages—I mean, where each person grew up in a different country—and have observed how, even in the most loving relationships with great mutual understanding, missteps and miscommunication are common, especially as two people are getting to know each other.
Devi Bhaduri
The father of the narrator, King Rao, was born a Dalit. His grandfather got the idea to improve their station in life by changing their last name to one from the Brahmin caste. In the real world, many Dalits in India have tried to protect themselves from caste discrimination by changing their surnames or having caste names removed from street names, but discrimination persists in India as well as abroad. Have you experienced any caste discrimination firsthand in the South Asian diaspora?
Vauhini Vara
I generally have not, though I’m very aware of its existence; while it feels important to me to identify as a Dalit writer, I want to be careful not to suggest that I have had personal, firsthand experience of caste oppression or discrimination. I grew up in Canada and the U.S. at a time when the Indian diaspora in North America wasn’t as large, and the importation of casteism not as well developed; my mom is not Dalit. As an adult, I’ve moved comfortably in rarefied spaces—Stanford, where I went to college, and media outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, where I’ve worked. If it’s all right to use this space to point people to Dalit writers who immigrated to the U.S. from India and have both experienced caste oppression firsthand and have engaged with it seriously, I’d recommend the scholar Suraj Yengde’s work; he wrote a book called Caste Matters, which combines memoir with scholarly analysis, and I admired “Castes of Mind,” an essay he wrote for the Baffler last year about caste in the U.S. Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, a memoir, is also excellent. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, an Indian-American Dalit activist whose parents left India in part to escape caste oppression, is publishing a book in November called The Trauma of Caste.
Devi Bhaduri
Inequality is a theme throughout the novel–whether it’s the Exes fighting a Shareholder system that gives the most Social Capital value to those born with the most privilege, the caste discrimination suffered by the Burra family, or the Burras outsourcing the removal of a cow’s carcass to a Muslim boy next door to the coconut plantation. The social, political, and commercial structures in the novel that reinforce inequality strongly resonate with our times. For example, you wrote:
“Race-baiting nationalists from oligarchical families began winning elections all over the world. It was the oldest trick around, promising the poor members of your own ethnic group that you’d help them become as rich as yourself, in large part by making sure that the poor members of other ethnic groups stopped stealing your group’s opportunities, thus dividing the poor so that they wouldn’t rise up together against the rich.”
I know you’re not a fortune teller, but…do you believe that we will see significant strides toward equality in society within our lifetimes? Are there ways that nations can prevent something like Algo—the master algorithm in the novel—from taking the world to a dystopian future such as Athena’s world?
Vauhini Vara
What I love about fiction is its ability to raise questions without being obliged to answer them. I wanted to present some competing models for the future: the Shareholder system and the alternative model of anarchist self-governance offered by the Exes. But both end up being flawed. I think the reason the novel doesn’t, in the end, offer a definitive answer about the best path forward is that I don’t think any of us know what it is—or whether one exists.
Devi Bhaduri
You have a short story collection coming out in 2023 called This is Salvaged. Is there anything you can tell us about it?
Vauhini Vara
The story collection has also been in the works for many, many years. When it comes out, the collection will include some stories that I began 15 years ago and have been working on since. The stories are set in a more realistic, contemporary world, but I think the central theme is very similar: The stories are all about people striving to find meaning in life by connecting with one another—with mixed results. A lot of the subject matter is very personal and intimate for me: grief and other kinds of losses.
FICTION
The Immortal King Rao
By Vauhini Vara
W. W. Norton and Company
Published May 3, 2022
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