
The Immortal King Rao
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Narrated by:
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Soneela Nankani
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By:
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Vauhini Vara
About this listen
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 US 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.
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Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected. But one day, a mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, the most intelligent fish on the planet.
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A delicious fictional romp through the philosophical questions related to human impacts on the planet.
- By Wyomingite on 04-26-25
By: Ned Beauman
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Telephone
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling.
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Unresolved
- By Amazon Customer on 04-22-25
By: Percival Everett
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Ghostroots
- Stories
- By: Pemi Aguda
- Narrated by: Délé Ogundiran, Ore Apampa-Araba
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
By: Pemi Aguda
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The Name of the Rose
- By: Umberto Eco, William Weaver - translator
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Neville Jason, Nicholas Rowe
- Length: 21 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. Brother William turns detective, and a uniquely deft one at that. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon-- all sharpened to a glistening edge by his wry humor and ferocious curiosity.
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The meaning of the mystery & mystery of meaning
- By Ryan on 02-14-14
By: Umberto Eco, and others
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Night Watch
- A Novel
- By: Jayne Anne Phillips
- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker, Theo Stockman, Maggi-Meg Reed
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
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Beautifully written historical novel
- By shastamax on 01-14-24
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A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth
- Stories
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Susannah Jones, Jay Ben Markson, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories cap a 15-year project.
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Amazing Literary Chops!
- By Chuck Jones on 01-01-21
By: Daniel Mason
What listeners say about The Immortal King Rao
Highly rated for:
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- H. Laurence Lareau
- 08-24-24
Great spin on an already interesting trope
SPOILERS ALL: My first exposure to the consciousness-uploaded-to-the-internet trope was in an early episode of the X Files. Agents Mulder and Scully were trying to figure out why the suspect needed T-1 access to the internet, and it took them an entire dial-up episode to suss out the plot to suicide and upload. The obvious next step with that trope is the streaming series Upload, where the afterlife becomes a capitalist hellscape. King Rau’s is an Indian Dalit-to-Silicon Valley-CEO Horatio Alger story, where the subtext is on technology’s and capitalism’s role in not fighting climate change. The narrator, his IVF-borne-by-surrogate-after-her-mother’s-death daughter, tells both his life story and her own, foregrounding permutations of class and economic conflicts in a dizzyingly non-linear fashion. King Rau’s youth, his founding and innovation at a parallel-universe Apple (Coconut in the book), his fall from the top of the digital world, and his upload-type creation and vision is a story of bizarre hope. His daughter’s story of growing up in almost complete isolation with her doting (and eventually senile) father, and her flight to join the Luddites who call themselves “Xs” is interwoven with her father’s. There is an overall darkness to both stories’ inability to deal with the looming extinction of humans due to Hothouse Earth—climate change writ large. Through both stories, vitally important human connections fade to insignificance because Fate awaits. The author mostly avoids the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Picard learns about an extinct civilization by having a single man’s uploaded consciousness dumped into his own head, yet there’s a hint that, after the last page is turned, that’s where the stories may wind up.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-28-24
Waste of time
The ending was incredibly rushed and incredibly bleak. The last hour of so is just a suffer fest. Feels like I wasted my time
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- SJR
- 06-27-22
Keeps getting better and better as it goes along.
The author tells several stories to piece together the larger narrative of King's life. Each story has its surpises and its 'aha' moments, when you suddenly understand. "Of course!". Each story is a glimps of how humans arrange governance and economics and the consequences of those arrangments. A productive coconut plantation pulls a family from untouchable to landowners, but then changes forever when they vote to divide it's bounty rather than share it together. The tragic consequences are practically narrated by a school teacher turn Maoist as he indoctronates his students
Together these stories paint a picture of our near future. When you finally see the picture, you an 'aha' moment. It's a picture of what the world has/will become. It's plausible and its terrifying.
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- Kirty Prabhakar
- 07-20-22
Excellent story, narration mostly good
Loved the book overall. the narration should have been more authentic with Telugu words.
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- Cooper Travis
- 06-24-22
it didn't have a resolution.
it just ended. I thought it was going into another chapter, but then it said the end.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Chike M Nzerue
- 04-22-23
Beautiful Novel
Fast- paced enthralling novel full of lively characters and conflicts. The plot is woven tightly around believable characters oscillating between challenges in rural India to Boston MA, and the Pacific Northwest. Suspenseful and full of twists and turns, love, romance, betrayal and loss. Could not stop until last chapter
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- M. D'Amico
- 05-28-24
Unique perspective
Overall, I enjoyed this dystopian tale. It clearly sent a cautionary message about our society. The main characters weren’t exactly like-able, yet I wanted to try to know them.
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- Sara Catlett
- 09-29-23
Beautifully written, incredibly thought provoking
My book club chose this as our September book, and we all loved it! Sitting under the cover of umbrellas during a rainy Seattle night, we discussed the various themes Vauhini Vara masterfully weaves throughout her debut novel. One of my fellow members grew up in Bainbridge, and I’ve visited Blake Island before—thus giving us the opportunity to better connect with Athena, the main character, as well as many of the cast of characters.
Additionally, Soneela Nankani did a terrific job transforming Vara’s written word into audio.
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- sean kilkenny
- 09-19-24
They did it! they finally did it! Screamed Charlton Heston
This story was eerily similar to what could be possible in the future. Very interesting.
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- Kyle
- 01-03-24
Vanity SciFi
The type of predictably diluted science fiction that is best avoided by even mildly seasoned readers with marginal imaginations.
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