Toward Eternity
Anton Hur
Toward Eternity
Anton Hur
In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer. The body’s cells are entirely replaced with nanites – robot or android cells which not only cure those afflicted but leaves them virtually immortal.
Literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning Beloved, in honor of his husband. When Yonghun – himself a recipient of nanotherapy – mysteriously vanishes into thin air and then just as suddenly reappears, the event raises disturbing questions. What happened to Yonghun, and though he’s returned, is he really himself anymore
When Dr. Beeko, the scientist who holds the patent to the nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness from the machine into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive – and begin to replicate – their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences.
Exploring the nature of intelligence and the unexpected consequences of progress, the meaning of personhood and life, and what we really have to fear from technology and the future, Toward Eternity is a gorgeous, thought-provoking novel that challenges the notion of what makes us human – and how love survives even the end of that humanity.
Review
Tracy Hwang
If you’re a fan of Korean translations, you might recognise the name Anton Hur, belonging to the translator of the bestselling therapy memoir, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and the International Booker-shortlisted story collection Cursed Bunny. He’s also the translator of several books by one of my favourite authors, Kyung-sook Shin, and I always look forward to any project he’s attached to. Naturally, news of his own debut novel caught my attention straightaway.
In the near-future world of Toward Eternity, ‘nanotherapy’ – the replacement of the body’s cells with android nanites – has been devised as a cure for cancer. One of the world’s first recipients of the treatment, Yonghun is now cancer-free and essentially immortal, eventually outliving his husband. In his grief, Younghun creates a living, thinking AI called Panit, teaching it how to understand and appreciate poetry. Panit’s consciousness is soon transferred into an android body and the development and consequences of this technology are chronicled through different perspectives over hundreds of years. It’s an ambitious undertaking that Hur pulls off spectacularly.
In an age where developments in AI are rapidly changing the way we live and the way we work, Hur seems to weigh-in on the ‘can AI replace writers and artists?’ debate: ‘The intelligence is in the appreciation of poetry, surely. Even more so than in generating it.’ His ideas about what it means to exist as a human being in our increasingly volatile society, and his assertion of the constant reinvention and metamorphosis of the self through language and art, feels tied to his experience as a translator and now author, as a mediator of life, language and stories. Toward Eternity is an intelligent, thought-provoking, and philosophical book for our times, one that remains hopeful that even at the end of the world and humanity as we know it, love always finds some way to exist.
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