Toward Eternity

February 1, 2024

Hur, an acclaimed translator, debuts with a thought-provoking speculative novel set in a near-future world in which robot nanites replace cancerous body cells and a living, thinking AI, with an understanding of poetry, gains freedom in an android body. Hur considers the definition of humanity and personhood and the consequences of technological progress. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 27, 2024
Translator Hur debuts with an ambitious and mostly successful story of human life transformed by technology. The novel begins in the near future, when a breakthrough treatment called nanotherapy replaces a terminally ill patient’s body with an immortal replica. In a journal, Dr. Mali Beeko, whose mother invented the procedure, records her misgivings after the first nanotherapy patient, a lover of 19th-century poetry named Yonghun Han, vanishes from a South African lab and reappears days later in the same place. Upon his return, Yonghun finds Mali’s journal and begins writing in it, confessing that he’s not the “real” Yonghun, even though he possesses Yonghun’s memories. Over the following decades nanodroids become common and AI is used for decision-making in military strategy. Though Hur’s worldbuilding occasionally feels unwieldy, the final sections are worth the wait, as nanodroids read Yonghun’s journal entries about poetry and consider the impact of art on humanity. Fans of Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel ought to take a look.

June 1, 2024
Letters from humankind and our descendants weave together a story of love, robots, and poetry. "Poetry is different from fiction, it's not about story, it's about becoming someone else," explains one of the leads in this thoughtful speculative experiment. In it, translator Hur tackles the existential questions posed in Blade Runner but finds answers (and a title) in Emily Dickinson. The novel opens on a crisis in South Africa, as researcher Mali Beeko wonders why one of her most important patients has disappeared. In this near-future, a chosen few have been rescued from early deaths by scientists who systematically replace every diseased cell in their bodies with a bioengineered healthy cell using nanites. This alone would be a cool way to ponder the Ship of Theseus, a philosophical exercise that questions the nature of identity when a person or object is replaced, but the experiment just keeps going. First, over time, the patients themselves becomes influential. Ellen Van der Merwe is a classical cellist whose terrible fate will only become clear later, while Yonghun Han is a literary researcher who uses his extra years to create an AI called Panit, or "Beloved," as a way to stay close to his late husband. Leaning more on literary discovery than hard SF tropes, the story is extrapolated to the far future by transposing Panit into an android body, followed inevitably by a war between the evolving androids (all reproductions of Ellen) and what people remain. That's a big idea, but the narrative here is more interested in who we are than who wins. It's a sad story, but Hur uses its disquieting ideas to sweet effect. It's an unfailing affirmation of the persistence of love and art, even in the face of oblivion, one that tells us "it's the story you write that is you." A novel that traces humanity's journey from what we imagine ourselves to be to what's next.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
National Book Award-finalist Hur is deservedly the Korean-to-English translator of choice. Language, unsurprisingly, drives his spectacular, speculative debut novel: "Language is like DNA. . . . It stores and creates our humanness." The expansive voices expound, recording humanity's iterations made (im)possible by AI. In "the near future," Dr. Mali Beeko records "something so extraordinary" in a physical notebook, because only the act of handwriting can help her process what's happened. Patient One, Yonghun Han, who became the first human to "transition into nanodroid" before cancer killed him, has disappeared. "The first human heart transplant was done by a South African doctor at a South African hospital; it is appropriate that the first . . . whole-body transplant, was first achieved here as well." Days later, Han reappears--naked, dazed, changed. Into Mali's notebook, this Han reveals his work programming the AI he names Panit (meaning "beloved") with Victorian poetry--which was "flowers and hearts," yes, but also "used as political propaganda, an indirect justification of the subjugation and domestication of the colonial Other." Han then passes the notebook to Patient Two. Over centuries, witnesses continue to fill the pages. "What else can we be but stories of ourselves that we tell ourselves?" Hur creates with expansive erudition harnessing science, technology, history, landscapes, culture; his world building is brilliant and boundless.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 1, 2024

DEBUT Hur, often award-nominated for his enthralling translations from Korean, crafts his own novel that is intensely focused on the power of language. It begins with a disappearance. New technology can replace human cells with nanites, saving people from life threatening diseases and, potentially, granting immortality. The second person to undergo this nanodroid process lives for decades, until the day he vanishes between one step and the next. A scientist who's intimately tied to this research begins to investigate, hiding her observations in a notebook. From then on, the characters skip across countless years, recording stories of their conflicts with technology, identity, and poetry as they pass the notebook along. Their struggles coalesce into a moving, philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive. Hur asks whether the self can exist beyond biology and memory, whether souls can be made rather than born, and whether the most enduring part of humanity might be as ethereal a concept as love. VERDICT Hur's thought-provoking novel will appeal to readers who love gripping metaphysical science fiction, such as Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory or Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God.--Matthew Galloway

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.