Vara, Vauhini
Entry updated 7 April 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1982- ) Canadian-born journalist, editor and author, in US from late childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "We'll Rise Above the Sky" in Glimmer Train for Summer 2013; her short fiction has been assembled as This Is Salvaged (coll 2025). She is of sf interest for her first novel, The Immortal King Rao (2022), set mostly in the Near Future of an Alternate World version of a "Hothouse Earth" devastated by Climate Change. The loose Jonbar Point of the tale may be the absence of various corporations, from IBM to Apple and beyond, along with the absence of their white male progenitors and culture-shapers. Eloquently narrated by his quasi-omniscient Genetically Engineered daughter (see Women in SF), King Rao's life and career focuses on his Invention, and their joint exploitation, of a Computer programme known as Harmonica which enables brain-Internet interfaces: liberating humans from the consequences of "civilization". The sting in the tail lies in the fact that this software also serves as an instrument through which social worth can be established, creating diasporas of the elect and the dispossessed across an already stricken planet. The Posthuman world in view seems dark. [JC]
Vauhini Vara
born Regina, Saskatchewan: 1 August 1982
works
- The Immortal King Rao (New York: W W Norton and Company, 2022) [hb/Keith Hayes/Ichpochmak/Shutterstock]
collections and stories
- This Is Salvaged (New York: W W Norton and Company, 2025) [coll: hb/Keith Hayes/KNV/Shutterstock]
links
previous versions of this entry