Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for the eARC of this book. I will say the synopsis drew me in but in the end this book wasn’t for me. The slight bit of mystery and sci fi wasn’t enough to keep me entranced. The introspective nature of the entire novel isn’t something I typically am interested in and the synopsis didn’t lead me to believe that would be a large portion of the book. However, the authors writing and the concept are still wonderful and I did enjoy aspects of the book.

Another fantastic entry for the ‘robots learning about their inner humanity’ genre. Toward Eternity is an ambitious sci-fi novel? novella? novelete? spanning hundreds of generation. Each chapter is a journal entry of a POV character in the wake of a new technology that allows one to replace one’s entire body with nanotechnology. Through these characters, some of whom re-appear, in some form or other, in the other chapters, Hur explores the question of what make art human? Where does that humanity stem from, if the human can be replaced, both body, and eventually, mind. This is definitely a book that deserves multiple re-reads and a lot of pondering. Given that I read it under relatively sleep-deprived circumstances, I don’t know if I was able to fully take in the story. However, I applaud the ambition of the story and I look forward to more of Hur’s original work. Overall, I rate this book a 4/5.

Review will go live on my blog on 28 June 2024

hello! i feel so utterly incapable of writing a review for this. it was stunning! brilliant!

towards eternity is written in the form of a journal, where entries are made throughout centuries through different interconnected characters. it follows a timeline where scientific developments allow one to eventually replace their cells with nanites - ridding one of disease and in turn, their mortality.

this is a future that is hurtling towards us at a startling speed. if you’ve been caught up on all the recent developments of elon musk’s neuralink, you’ll understand that replacing our cells with little robots is something that might one day be very much feasible. perhaps not in our lifetime.

[neuralink is .. controversial. being able to control technology through chemical signals from your brain sounds fascinating and very convenient. however, there’s always the other side, the micro chip being hacked and then sending signals to your brain.]

i digress! the human body is nothing but flesh and meat without the brain. there’s lots of differing cultural thought on whether it is our consciousness that gives rise to critical thought or if it is the chemicals in the brain that give rise to the consciousness. western thought argues that the soul is an individual being, while some eastern cultures seem the soul to be connected to a larger consciousness of the whole.

where do we begin (our consciousness/soul) and where do we end (our mortal body)? this is the question of the ages. the one thing mankind can agree on, i suppose, is that our mortality—the undefeated and outrunnable promise of death—is what makes life and humanity so precious. when we give up our mortality, do we cease to be human?

that is what anton hur aims to respond to in toward eternity. in a way only a lover of languages could, anton has weaved together a beautiful story of life, exploring the interconnectedness of language, music, and poetry, which transcend the boundaries of time and mortality — the threads that bind us to our humanity. isn’t it wonderful that our mortal beings create such immortal art? how the words spoken today will be echoed on the dawn of tomorrow?

a stunning novel that resonates deeply, leaving us with a profound appreciation for the enduring legacy of human expression. I hope to include quotes upon publication because there are so many beautiful lines.

"What is DNA but lines in a narrative of our lives? What else is all our code? Our literature? They exist before we do. We exist to perpetuate them. To perpetuate story."

A really hard book to rate as I try to process a multitude of conflicting feelings about what I just read. One thing for sure is Toward Eternity leaves a lot to ponder over. However, I think books that fall under the "literary" science fiction category may just not be for me, as I often find that they attempt to tackle some pretty hefty topics in unsatisfactory ways. In this case, it was humanity's transendance over the corporeal as well as the everlasting nature and beauty of art.

Hur's debut work is...ambitious to say the least and almost impossible to summarize sufficiently. The book utilizes a unique storytelling structure where we essentially ricochet from one character to another across generations and centuries until the end of time. For instance, one character that crosses paths with the current POV character will become the POV in the next chapter and so on. This could have made for a very fractured and disjointed reading experience but instead was brilliantly done by Hur and really helped to emphasize the interconnectedness of human lives. His language was oftentimes ethereal and occasionally I found his commentary on immortality and the deep ache of grief to be particularly moving. At the same time, however, some aspects of the book (especially Hur's tendency to over-season the story with actual poetry fragments) as well as the author's other philosophical musings fell towards the more ham-fisted.

The last few chapters were absolutely gorgeous though and if the rest of the book had carried that same sort of atmosphere and levity this would have been a masterpiece. Also!!! Love it when that moment of clarity about a book's title hits you like a sucker punch 😭😭😭

This is the most artistic and intricate exploration of AI, consciousness, and what it means to be human since the famous Star Trek: TNG episode "The Offspring" back in 1990. The parallels between Yonghun's creation of the AI entity Panit (meaning "Beloved") and Data's creation of the humanoid android Lal (after the Hindi word for "Beloved") are crystalline. A novel of immense warmth, heart, intelligence, and soul: a thoroughly captivating read.

This novel read to me as a curious attempt to answer the eternal question of “What makes us human?” in AI-related context. Structured as entries in a journal spanning literal centuries, passed from key individual to key individual, it takes the reader through the history of this imagined future in leaps and bounds - some more impactful than others.

There were things about this story that definitely resonated with me - like Mali's constant pain of missing her deceased mother, Ellen’s depth coupled with occasional almost clinical detachment, Delta’s journey - and things that I found absolutely believable and reasonable, like how every technology is inevitably co-opted by the military and how exactly that could backfire when self-aware AI and nanite tech is involved. I mostly enjoyed the style and how some aspects were (purposefully, I assume) left vague or were meant to be a thought-provoking start to a longer reflection/conceptualization process.

If I had to formulate what I think the author’s answer is to “What makes us human?”, I would say “Poetry, music and love”, and your love for the book will probably hinge on how much this answer resonates with you.

3.5 rounded up to 4, with many thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of the book.

I have followed the author through their prolific work as translator to some of the most celebrated contemporary Korean literature. So it makes sense that the focal point of their sci-fi novel is language and is an expansive meditation on the power of it through a narrative spanning centuries and galaxies. The narrative doesn't delve deep into any particular technology or break new ground. It instead uses existing technology and sci-fi tropes, and instead of indulging in the weeds of scientific details it indulges in the language and psychological details. Which is compelling and poetic, but often flirts with the edge of digression into thought experiments. Just as I'm about to start questioning some of the "how"s, the story jumps forward to the next baton (notebook) holder to tell the next part of the story of humans and nanite-transformed immortal clones. I'm tempted to complain about the masterful hand waving and distraction from the juicy science stuff, but the author distracted me with poetry instead, my other kryptonite. I feel like a lot of hard sci-fi readers may not be as pleasantly distracted and find this, not unjustifiably, a bit on the pretentious side. Yet, I couldn't put the book down and read it in basically two sittings. It reads like the movie Interstellar -- expansive, deeply human, resilient and hopeful. There is so much in this that is a meditation on being Other-ed by creations of humanity that can be both beautiful and oppressive, the inevitability of immortality through language, and so much more. In the first third or so of the book, a lot of that is conveyed more or less as authorial sidebars, but gradually the poetry of it all becomes an active participant in how the narrative unfolds. Overall, even though it's not perfect, I'm excited that a celebrated multilingual translator of world literature has entered the world of speculative fiction and I'm excited to see what their voice will create next.

This was absolutely wonderfully done. The language and style was smooth, giving the book a wonderful place. Thought provoking and beautiful.

I'll start off by saying I'm not a huge fan of the philosophical type of science fiction that reads similar to literary fiction, but I still enjoyed this book. It took me a bit to get into but I still thought it was thought-provoking and pretty solid. I thought it started off quite slow and took a while for me to get into it but once it goes, it was a nice pace on contemplating what it means to be human.

Thank you for the ARC!

This is a gentle and contemplative exploration of how we grasp at identity and yet construct our humanity through our relationships with others. The language is poetic and soft, with an inquisitive, wandering quality. There are numerous characters that move in and out of the story’s centuries, and they are specific and heartfelt, each given time and space to open and discover themselves. There isn’t a strong narrative, at least not foregrounded, as we move liberally across time and space with multiple narrators. There is an implicit narrative, in the background, the events happening around our various narrators, but that is more circumstance than propelling narrative. The closest thing to narrative might be the interconnection that binds them all together, narrative in feeling if not in style. Even without a strong narrative each new chapter was compelling. The way the various narrators were structures, and how the voices built on one another, was intriguing and inviting, it made me not only care about these characters but to see where and how they experienced their journeys.

The story has this literary conceit, that each chapter is being written down in a single notebook by that particular narrator, and this notebook makes its way from one narrator to the next throughout the evolving story. I usually don’t really feel the need for this literary device, it feels both limiting and prescriptive, and often there seem like weird hoops to jump through to make it plausible that this story is being independently written by the characters in the story. That was true here, too, I think the overwhelming majority of the story could be told the exact same way without this device. Arguably, language, poetry, and the idea of communication and legacy is critical to this story, and so this framing device aligns with that, and so it may be intended to shape the reader experience. I feel a similar intimacy could be nurtured without this device, by letting the reader flow into and through the various narrators lives without the prescription of notebook, kind of adopting a metanarrative idea that us, as readers, create the story anew every time we engage it. We write the story ourselves through our participating in the lives of the characters, not through their contrived writing down of their histories. However, all that said, while I feel this device wasn’t necessary and there may have been a type of intimacy to be explored had it been absent, I didn’t feel like it hampered the story, and I did appreciate the consummate attention to the power of language.

I say this is a gentle story, reflective and contemplative. But it contains eternities, and folded in those stories are loss, grief, anger, rage, violence. Not everything in this story is pleasant, not everything optimistic, but it is always intentional. It paints an ultimately hopeful portrait of what humanity can become, even in the face of destruction or loss, as long as we endeavor to preserve what truly makes us whole—the stories we create about ourselves and those we love.

I want to thank the author, the publisher HarperVia, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

So it’s enhanced immortal humans that are being cloned and we watch them live, learn, love, question life and themselves. Sure. Great concept. I only got through 70% of this— when they were starting to build some kind community for the Eves— so it may have turned around but from this start this was too cold and clinical in it’s story telling and characterisation. The type of science fiction that’s more philosophical and poetic than exciting and shocking. If you’re more into literary fiction you might love this.

*Thank you A. Hur and HarperVia for Towards Eternity’s ARC.

“…the love we give and receive shapes us, and I have spent too many years giving and receiving love from a ghost, and too many years being a ghost, a ghost of someone else.”

“Toward Eternity,” by Anton Hur

This book was really not for me. There were many good aspects, they just didn’t really interest me in the end. It is a dystopian with gods and fantasy and magic. It’s very philosophical which is where it lost my interest. It was unique that there was a mix of advanced technology with gods, I did find it a little hard to picture with the way it was written. 2 out of 5 stars.

-Dragons
-Gods/ Immortals
-Racism
-Seoul
-Dystopian

Thank you for the ARC

This is a fantastic book. The entire story spans hundreds of years—starting, I believe, about 50 or so years in our current future. In the world of the book, mankind has not only created AGI (artificial general intelligence) but also a type of nanobot that can fully replace a person’s corporeal form if damaged or diseases. The story takes the form of a notebook that is written in by several characters - humans and semi-androids alike.

But what really makes this book unique is the use of Victorian poetry as the linchpin of humanity. It’s a really lovely narrative on how we think we shape language but language really shapes us. I loved it.

Toward Eternity is a thought-provoking and layered exploration of the far-reaching tendrils of language, art, and destruction that will stay with you long after you finish it. It connects the everyday act of speaking to the profound questions of existence, both human and synthetic, and leaves you pondering the power of words to define and redefine both ourselves and the world around us. It becomes delightfully nerdy with how it achieves that — if you studied Victorian literature (like myself), you're going to be thrilled by the philosophical conversations had in this book. I've always loved Anton Hur as a translator, and it's wonderful to add him as a favourite novelist, too.

Anton Hur's debut novel Toward Eternity is absolutely everything a reader could ask for from speculative fiction. Already at the forefront of literature with his breadth of translation work, Anton Hur explores what it means to be human and machine.

This novel allows the escape to a world not quite yet our own with the immediacy of recognizing our direct role in the development of artificial intelligence.
Manipulation of language allows readers to redefine the humanities. Everything humans experience is the humanities, including the artificial.

The romantic blend of humanity and science reveals the struggle between past and present - human and machine. Toward Eternity is consuming.

Unlike every character we meet in this novel, I don't have sufficient language to communicate how I feel. This story is beautiful.

"The way we use language to describe the Other is a large part of what gives that Other their humanity."

"Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –"

Language creates reality
——-
That’s a phrase I have shared regularly in the several decades since I first encountered it. Language can be immensely powerful. A concept previously vague becomes formed in people & society when someone assembles - and even creates - words that give structure and form to the concept. If done well those words and meanings then become how society defines and thinks about that concept from then on - or, the words inspire others to expand on them. As said in the book: “Language contains our knowledge, and at the same time fails to contain it.”

This will be an awesome book read for those - like me - who are drawn to this power of language. The book takes the concept of my introductory phrase to the far end of its implications. And uses beautiful language to take us there.

Simultaneously it uses the freedom of fiction to connect language to the philosophy of human - and synthetic - existence, and meaning. “The way we use language to describe the Other is a large part of what gives that Other their humanity.” Then, “Turing tests meant nothing for Panit [an AI character. -jb], who had already passed several variations of them. The only things those tests proved was that humanity is not intrinsic, it is given, bestowed.”

These early tastes of insight are a mere appetizer in a book-sized multi-course meal of inquiry into the nature of being. I have so much text underlined in this - likely more than hundreds of other books - because the insights explore unexplored ideas, and the language used doing so is so well chosen.

There are so many treats to chew on as you read. Other examples:
- “That’s not quite what I mean. Is there a computer program that can read poetry? The intelligence is in the appreciation of poetry, surely. Even more so than in generating it.”
- “… but the only way through time is forward, and the only way to change the past is to change the future. It’s to change the way we remember it.“ (This can be so powerful - and misused. Without intending to cast aspersions, I would point out Donald Trump (Sr.) as a master of this point.)
- “Dr. Han used his specialization in Victorian poetry and modern subjectivity to prove human subjectivity was the product of language, not exclusively the product of neurophysiological emergent behavior.”
- “The act of destruction completes the work, in a way,” said the historian. “Its fragility was always an inherent part of its aesthetic value. Destroying it simply brings this conception of the fragile to its natural conclusion.”

And I could go on and on.

I try to be stingy when giving stars in a review, and so created a rating structure to keep me honest. (See below.) I think if 5 stars are too-freely given, their value diminishes. Yet, without hesitation, I give this five stars.

Did I have some bones to pick? Yes. But I can overlook them. Speaking of them may bring about a reality in which you don’t read this book, and I think you’ll be happier if you do.

For the record, my rating rules:
- Five stars is when you read a book to the end, put it down, take a deep breath, pick it up and start reading it all over again - or you would if you weren't so anxious to read the next book in a multi-book series. Or, it's simply really good.
- Four stars is when you tell yourself : ”This is good, this is well-written, this is full of interesting ideas/characters/plot points”, but you know you will never read it again.
- Three stars is when you read it to the end, put it down and proceed to forget all about it in the next instant.
- Two stars when it's so bad that it makes you laugh, or sigh, and want to write a review, but you can't remember the name of the book or dislike it so much that you don't.
- One star when you can't read past chapter 3, even as penance for your sins.

thanks netgalley and the publisher for providing an e-arc.

well, Anton Hur's Towards Eternity is a pretty solid debut. I very much enjoyed the time i spent in this book. it was not an espetacular book as I was thinking of it, but it has executed the main directions, so it's good. solid.

I mean first of all that cover. That cover drew me in and it did not disappoint. Written by Anton Hur (whose translations I love), this book is very much the ship of Theseus but for humans as opposed to shops. Thanks for the arc

Already renowned for his works of translation, Anton Hur demonstrates his prowess as a novelist in Toward Eternity, an engrossing exploration of the essence of humanity.

While the narrative initially embraces a slow pace and interiority for our protagonists, it begins to accelerate through time, challenging readers to keep pace with the plot’s ever-expanding Russian Doll-like recursions. I preferred the start of the story for its more accessible nature, but I understood the choice to jump through time to see how the past had reverberated into the future.

The novel truly shines when contemplating memory, artistry, and what it means to be human in the face of technological progress. Much like the Ship of Theseus paradox, if nanotechnology replaced our cells one by one, at what point do we stop being ourselves? And, from the perspective of artistic expression, if you are an instrumentalist playing notes written by someone else, are you any less an artist? Does your music not draw from your soul? I found these questions to be particularly interesting, especially considering Hur’s prolific work translating the words of other novelists and how that might inform his viewpoint on this.

Ultimately, there’s quite a bit to take away from Toward Eternity – you can latch on to the big ideas and philosophical questions it raises or you can just focus on the fun, sci-fi thriller aspects that make this so readable. Either way, Hur has written something really wonderful and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.