FICTION
Towards Eternity: A Novel
by Anton Hur.
HarperVia, 2024 ($26.99)
Anton Hur’s Towards Eternity blends the music of science and of poetry to inform a story of future love, struggle, and tiny robots referred to as nanites. Like a reverse-engineered allegory, the novel makes an attempt to fuse the ahead momentum of the reader’s look after its most compelling character, Yonghun Han, with high-concept concepts about biotechnology, the way forward for Earth and the query of identification.
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Han is “Patient One.” He’s been remade in a laboratory in Cape City, South Africa, by Mali Beeko, a physician who has cured Han’s most cancers by way of nanite mobile alternative, which basically renders the recipient immortal. Though Han’s physique is new, a scar from a earlier kitchen accident has returned to his pores and skin, as if the bodily could be affected by the ability of the thoughts. When Han disappears from Beeko’s Singularity Lab into skinny air, nobody has an evidence—and so they’re equally mystified when he reappears. This returned Han believes he’s “not Yonghun Han. I am whatever came back with his body.” Han finds Beeko’s journal and continues to jot down in it in an try and make sense of his expertise. That is the vanity that carries the guide ahead by way of time as numerous characters inherit the journal and propel the narration into the extraordinarily far future.
The early chapters are suffused with emotional resonance due to Han’s extraordinary love for his husband, Prasert, a scholar of Nineteenth-century poetry who has been lifeless for a decade. There are flashback scenes of Prasert ceding the final chunk of a meal to Han and giving Han a again rub, all of which convey a real sweetness and authenticity that’s uncommon in depictions of affection on the web page. The not-Han that has come again grapples with Han’s reminiscences of that relationship in ways in which query personhood and identification: “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 this world again, searching for what it had lost.”
The tenderness of that bond additionally opens an area for Hur to discover the confluence of science and the humanities. Han creates an artificial-intelligence entity named Panit to assist him higher perceive poetry. A dialogue between Han and Panit about Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” showcases the novel at its greatest. In a way, Han is speaking to a model of himself, having skilled the AI on his expertise of poetry, and the scene ought to be solipsistic. As a substitute this dialog about Rossetti “teasing a secret but never revealing it” evokes, once more, Han’s deep love for Prasert.
Are we actually so resigned to disaster that we simply trudge ahead, hoping to eke out some leisure earlier than the top?
Quickly sufficient the pocket book is handed to Meeko’s Affected person Two. Ellen, a musician, has a extra aloof tone, and her perspective serves as a helpful distinction to Han’s remembered heat, accentuating it drastically. Because the poetry cedes delight of place to music, Ellen’s encounter with doubles of herself presages a future nanite-person takeover of the world whereas giving clues to the thriller of Han’s disappearance and reappearance. When Panit, the AI, will get time with the pocket book, we study extra about Meeko’s experiments. However because the novel slips formally into the longer term with half two (“The Future”), different kinds of slippage happen.
The science of fiction writing has few onerous guidelines besides that just about something can work. The scaffolding of an thought can carry a novel by way of to the top, even with out sustaining the psychological richness Han’s early chapters accomplish so effectively. However characterization—committing to interiority and depth of character—is tougher to maintain with out the creator’s fixed and devoted consideration. A novel that got down to be pathos turns into virtually solely a science experiment.
It begins with a Panit-Han hybrid, a fusion persona in bodily type that overuses the phrase “ghost” to a pathological extent. When this hybrid pines for a kid and encounters a doomed love, the scenes echo Han’s relationship with Prasert, although now to lesser impact. Because the journal passes from hand at hand sooner or later, it feels as if the pages have gotten washed out, the entities writing it much less and fewer knowable.
Because the narrative progresses into the far future, the construction turns into tougher to observe. The story swaggers by way of time and character views, the connective tissue usually missing or delivered to the reader by way of explanatory dialogue. I’d have beloved to come across extra pressure between the rising dominance of AI and the know-how’s big drain on sources and thievery of individuals’s mental property and labor. These points are current however principally by way of sheer extrapolation.
A part of what makes the novel more and more onerous to observe is the blurriness of the scenes. For essentially the most half, Hur doesn’t present a lot description of the longer term settings besides when noting there are “trees” or “rocks.” What’ll be maybe most evident to readers who admire modern science fiction is that Hur largely sidesteps the evolution and penalties of our climate disaster. As a substitute of exploring these tough edges, he principally obliterates them through the use of the system of a widespread nuclear struggle. A struggle that brings mass extermination is hell, all proper, however with its harshness blasted out, the longer term doesn’t really feel fairly as actual or totally realized.
The novel involves a halt in an extended part written from the perspective of Delta, a model of Panit-Han’s daughter grown in a nanite vat. Delta has simply performed one thing horrible to humanity, but there’s little sense of the burden of Delta’s actions within the storyline. As a substitute of one thing incendiary, one thing radical, we get principally extra dialogue moderately explaining the longer term.
Are we actually so resigned to disaster that we simply trudge ahead, hoping to eke out some leisure before the top? This tone of amiability that creeps into the writing appears to be meant to please the reader, to uninteresting the ache of people shedding who we’re. I usually wished that the language have been sharper.
Writing in regards to the impact of poetry is completely different than being poetry. For some time Towards Eternity is poetry, till entropy units in. By the point the novel reaches its finish, the carrying ahead of the beloved Han feels attenuated, greedy. The burning core of the narrative—that superbly depicted relationship within the early chapters—is a distant flame you not really feel the warmth of. The issues that make us uniquely human are just too far previously.
