The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frightfully prescient story about a near-future dystopian world succumbing to irreversible global warming, with a variant of Facebook (now ominously called Meta) and its Board of Directors replacing sovereign governments and ruling humanity in the form of a supranational entity. Levels of consumerism determine one’s social status, surrogacy is par for the course, children are sold for survival, economic disparity persists.

A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in and amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society...A dangerous force underlying both of these economic models, a mindless cycle of economic production and consumption that relied on co-opting the collective brain and brawn of the human species, thus annihilating the human soul.

A novel concept introduced is a chimera of software and genetic engineering that lodges in the brain, sequesters carbon and silicon and ‘constructs’ an organic chip that connects an individual to the internet.
The different temporal narrative streams are quote tiresome to read.

View all my reviews