Toward Eternity: A Novel
“One does not have to be an avid reader of science fiction to become totally absorbed in the world Anton Hur creates in Toward Eternity . . .”
Spanning centuries and various locations on earth and beyond, Anton Hur’s challenging, stimulating first novel, Toward Eternity, probes the grand question of what it means to be human through speculating on what it would mean to be not-human—an android. The story is told through an old-fashioned form of record-keeping—memories saved in old, lined notebooks.
The opening sections of Toward Eternity introduce us to three principal characters whose experiences develop key themes that will be explored throughout the rest of the novel: mortality, love, language, and art, particularly poetry and music.
Hur’s saga begins in South Africa in “the near future.” Yonghun Han, a Korean scholar of Victorian poetry who is known at the Beeko Institute as “Patient One,” has disappeared and, four days later, miraculously reappeared. Han, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, had come to the institute for an experimental treatment which involved replacing his diseased cells with nanites, tiny machines. The cure defies not only disease, but also death, conferring on Han “the hell of immortality.” It did allow Han 30 more years with his beloved husband, who has recently passed away. Han has spent the past years teaching Panit, an artificial intelligence, how to read and analyze poetry.
When Yonghun Han reappears, it is actually in the body of an android. Since this machine, which looks exactly like Han and contains, “his memories, his personality, his habits, and everything one might construe as ‘him,’” is it not really Han? What this android learns through Han’s memories, is the power of the love that he and his husband felt for each other: “I am the recursion, the vessel necessary for the love to return, a love so great it has overcome the death of its previous vessels to live in the world again, searching for what it had lost.” Through the poetry he has taught Panit, Han will allow poetry to become immortal.
Patient Two is Ellen, a South-African cellist who has devoted her career to chamber music. For her, music is a mystical experience: “We do not create music, we draw it out from underneath the silence.” Ellen starts seeing versions of herself. Is she somehow replicating? The multiple versions of Ellen who appear and disappear become both destroyers and saviors.
Panit’s story changes when he is offered the opportunity to being instantiated into an android who looks exactly like Yonghun Han. The transformation leads Panit to understand the power of sensation: “I realized for the first time that shapes, colors, shades, all these bits of visual data that I had only regarded as information were actually imbued with emotions.” Panit’s human form brings with it a desire for children that eventually leads him to make a loving sacrifice that represents the best aspect of humanity, even though the results are destructive.
The turning point in the novel comes when the Beeko Institute is sold to a Korean corporation intent on using nanite technology to create machines of war. The result is a 100-year war that devastates the planet. Ultimately androids wipe out most of “the redundants,” their term for humanity. Can the remaining human community, hiding in Antarctica, create a technology that allows them to survive?
This is a familiar story that has been told many times over the past century, but Hur gives it a fascinating twist. What if some of the androids, created only to be mindless killers, started remembering bits of poetry, snatches of music? What if they started to feel love toward each other? What if, in other words, they started to become fully human? Can these evolved androids co-exist with humans?
Hur’s story is thrilling and often frightening. It is also a vehicle for his ruminations on language, memory, and art. Hur, who has spent his career as a successful translator of the works of other authors, is particularly sensitive to the nuances of language. Perhaps the most human aspect of his android characters is their passion for telling their own stories, for passing on their history. One of the evolved androids keeps writing in the notebooks, “To keep the momentum of the story going, to keep evolving and mutating and passing on this scaffolding of change and evolution: the words.” Like many writers who create characters, Hur ponders whether we create language or language creates us. Language allows us “to write selves into being.”
Anyone who has read Hur’s translations of Korean fiction knows, he has always been gifted at transforming a writer’s vision and style into another language. He has also clearly absorbed some of the best of speculative fiction. There are echoes, for instance, of Kazuo Ishiguro’s classic, Never Let Me Go, but however much it builds on tropes used by past authors, Hur’s narrative is idiosyncratic. In Toward Eternity, Hur, who has translated major works of Korean queer fiction such as Sung Young Park’s Life in the Big City, also eloquently celebrates same-sex love.
One does not have to be an avid reader of science fiction to become totally absorbed in the world Anton Hur creates in Toward Eternity, a novel that explores some of the most crucial issues of our time and ponders what may lie ahead for us and our creations.