Vauhini Vara
Allen & Unwin
Otago Daily Times, December 10th 2022
King Rao, founder of the Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook-like Coconut Corporation, is dead. Luckily, he downloaded his memories to his daughter Athena before his passing. Now she has returned to civilisation to share the story of how a young Dalit boy from a coconut plantation on the outskirts of Kothapalli rose to the position of CEO in the supranational Shareholder Government and fell to spend his final years on a deserted island in the Puget Sound with his only child. But her reception by the outside world is far from the welcome that she expected, and it seems that she will be forced to pay for her father’s sins.
The tale of King and Athena is gripping and engaging, but it is the lightly sketched and chilling society Vara creates that really stands out. Taking elements that already exist today – Chinese concepts of social capital, libertarian-inspired outsourcing of social services to private corporations, algorithmic justice, and climate-change fatalism – she follows their trajectory to their logical conclusion. In so doing, she paints a frighteningly plausible capitalist utopia where global citizen shareholders are legally required to consume Shareholder-made products in return for access to education, work, housing, and healthcare; frogs slowly boiled alive in an overheated world.
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