In physics, singularity is the point where known physical laws break down and predictions become impossible. The Big Bang theory suggests our universe emerged from such a singularity. That is an infinitely dense, hot point which expanded and cooled. At this moment, conventional concepts of time and space lose meaning.

Anton Hur’s debut novel Toward Eternity begins with one such singularity in “the near future”. Mali Beeko, lead scientist at the Singularity Lab, discovers a way to beat cancer. The treatment replaces each cell of the human body with android cells called nanites, thus not only ridding their body of disease but also granting them immortality.

In many ways, the disappearance of Yonghun, a cancer patient at the Lab known as “Patient One”, is the singularity point of the novel’s universe an event Mali terms his “rapturing”: the nanite technology has deviated from the Lab’s original calculations, the first sign of its unpredictability. Yonghun’s vanishing act leaves Mali confounded, with no explanation. At that moment, as the entire institute searches for Yonghun and science fails Mali, she interestingly turns towards Panit—the poetry AI that Yonghun, who has a PhD in long nineteenth-century verse, built—for answers.

Also Read | In ‘The Coincidence Plot’, Anil Menon leaves nothing to chance

The lines between science and literature overlap and blur as the story moves from Cape Town to Thailand to Lisbon to Antarctica and then leaves Earth behind, to space, jumping through demarcated sections titled “the near future”, “the future”, “this distant future”, and “the very distant future”, even as new characters are introduced every couple of pages. It is as Mali wonders: “Are scientists the poets of the natural world? Or are poets scientists of the imagined world?”

Memory and immortality

This is where Hur’s decades of experience as a celebrated Korean translator—best known for translating Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (both were nominated for the 2022 International Booker Prize), and Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki—shine through. On the surface, the novel navigates the intimacy and symbolism of words and language through the seductive tryst of humankind and technology. But beneath the dystopian set-up, it explores the ideas of love and death or rather the endurance of those binaries through time—memory and immortality. Coincidentally, both literature and science hold the keys to deciphering such questions. 

In Toward Eternity, the bridge connecting both is the epistolary device—a journal that makes its way into the hands of each of the narrators (seven in all). Despite the scale of the book, the many time jumps and changes in scenery are easy to follow because he offers diverse characters with stimulating perspectives. Although these characters vary in ethnicity, age, gender, and being human or “nanodroid”, their voices are equally engaging. Mali calls language “inadequate” yet writes her thoughts down to make sense of the science behind Yonghun’s disappearance. Ellen, an instrumentalist, grapples with the fine line between creation and interpretation. With Panit, we see life through the lens of someone who once used to be a machine and then became mortal, spanning decades.

The proliferation of nanodroids is the trajectory of humanity’s evolution. At one point, a Korean company called Janus Corp. buys Singularity Lab to manage the country’s rapid population decline. However, decades later, Janus Corp. is renamed JANUS and redirects nanite technology into military and war strategy, creating war machines named Eves and bringing about humanity’s destruction. By the time the journal is passed onto Delta, an Eve, it becomes noticeable that every passing narrator is made of more nanite than human cells. This simultaneous revelation is integral to the novel’s constant exploration of what it means to be human.

In Hur’s novel, having nanite cells does not necessarily make one non-human, rather the focus is on the entity’s consciousness. Once it is confirmed that Janus Corp. will take over, Mali offers Panit the opportunity to be “mortal”, allowing him to move into a physical body rather than stay contained in the lab’s database. Panit points out then: “She did not say ‘human’ or ‘real’ or ‘person’ because to her, I was already, sufficiently, all of these things. She was asking if I wanted to be mortal. Mortal as in mors, the Latin root of ‘death’. She wanted to know if I wanted to be able to die.”

Remarkably, poetry becomes one of the measures to define a nanodroid’s defectiveness, marking it as something likely to make one more human. Delta hides the fact that she can recall entire stanzas and poems because she knows it could get her “killed”. Her ability to recall poetry is why she is appointed keeper of the journal, which comes to be known as the “Codex” in her time. The Codex acts as a record, tracing the evolution/destruction of humankind. Unlike Delta, the previous narrators were not appointed—the journal was merely a journal. They were unaware of the gravity of their role, not knowing that they were leaving parts of themselves etched in humanity’s collective memory forever.

Series of echoes

This is the heart of the novel: love and memory transcending time and death, over and over again. Mali propels nanotherapy research in the hopes of bringing her mother back, Yonghun undergoes nanotherapy because he wants to have a longer life with his husband, and Panit gives away his mortal body to JANUS because he wants to save his dying daughter. Panit foreshadows that early on in a conversation with Mali as well: “He [Yonghun] believed that we die and disappear but leave behind our humanity to be picked up in our art, in our languages.” Panit himself is Yonghun’s legacy. Similarly, each character becomes a legacy of another as they descend from each other’s consciousness and bodies.

Death does not mean a definite end, but Hur portrays it as a series of echoes in which the consciousness survives, with learned language and memory, constantly “running toward eternity”. In the echoes, Mali reunites with her mother and Yonghun reunites with his husband. Death offers life its meaning and makes memories precious. The journal continually passes through different hands because the physical body dies but the soul, the art lives forever.

Also Read | Body doubles: Review of ‘Cursed Bunny’ by Bora Chung

In many ways, Hur’s debut novel too is the persistence of love and memory, a culmination of himself and his work as a translator. Each of his translations has traces of him as much as the authors themselves, and in Toward Eternity, we see the traces they have left on his own writing. He writes queer love, science fiction, and on Victorian poetry—things that are central to his identity and part of the master’s he earned from Seoul National University. Thailand in Toward Eternity is reminiscent of its bittersweet memories in Love in the Big City. The exploration of the human condition through a lens that combines the ordinary with the extraordinary draws parallels with Cursed Bunny. There are memories and names of characters that belong to Hur and people he knows, an already intimate novel made exhilarating if one is familiar with his work.

Ultimately, Toward Eternity is a book that could have been written only by a translator coming into his own as a writer, a conversation and communion between the two who cannot exist without the other. Or as Hur himself writes in the novel: “What else can we be but stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves?”