fiction
Towards Eternity: A Novel
By Anton Herr.
HarperVia, 2024 ($26.99)
Anton Herr Towards eternity Blending the music of science with poetry, it tells a futuristic tale of love, war, and tiny robots called nanomachines. Like a reverse-engineered fable, the novel seeks to blend high-concept ideas about biotechnology, the future of the Earth, and questions of identity with the forward momentum of the reader’s compassion for its most compelling character, Young-Hoon Han.
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Han is “Patient 1.” He was regenerated in a lab in Cape Town, South Africa, by Mari Beeco, a doctor who cured Han’s cancer by implanting nanomachine cells into him. The transplant essentially makes the recipient immortal. Han’s body is new, but the scars from his previous kitchen accident have returned to his skin, as if the body is affected by the power of the mind. When Han vanished without a trace from Beeco’s Singularity Lab, no one could explain it, and when he reappeared, they were all equally confused. Upon his return, Han believes he is not Young-Hoon Han, but something that came back with his body. Han finds Beeco’s diary and continues to write it in an attempt to make sense of his experiences. This is the idea that propels the book forward through time, as various characters inherit the diary, propelling the story far into the future.
The early chapters are filled with emotional resonance as Han harbors extraordinary affection for her husband, Prasert, a scholar of 19th-century poetry who died a decade ago. There are flashbacks of Prasert giving Han the last bite of his meal or rubbing her back, all of which communicate a genuine tenderness and authenticity that is rare in portrayals of love on the page. A returning non-Han character wrestles with Han’s memories of that relationship in ways that call into question personhood and identity: “I am the recursion, the vessel necessary for love to return, a love so great that it will live in the world again, overcoming the death of its former vessel and searching for what it lost.”
The tenderness of this bond also opens the space for Hoa to explore the intersection of science and art. Han creates an artificial intelligence called Panit to better understand poetry. Han and Panit’s discussion of Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” is the novel’s quintessential moment. In a way, the scene should be smug, as Han is training an AI based on his experience with poetry and talking to another version of himself. However, this conversation, in which Rossetti “hints at but never reveals secrets,” once again evokes Han’s deep affection for Prasat.
Are we really resigned to the catastrophe and just plodding along, hoping to find a little joy before the end?
Eventually, the notebook is handed over to Meeko’s patient number two. Eren the musician has a colder tone, and her perspective contrasts greatly with the warmth of Han’s memory. As poetry gives way to music, Eren’s encounter with his alter-ego foreshadows a future nanite takeover of the world, while also providing clues to the mystery of Han’s disappearance and reappearance. When the AI Panit has time to interact with the notebook, we learn more about Meeko’s experiments. But when the novel formally moves forward in the second part (“The Future”), a different kind of slippage occurs.
There are few hard and fast rules in fiction writing, except that almost anything can work. A scaffolding of ideas can carry a novel to its end without maintaining the psychological richness that Han achieved so well in his opening chapters. But characterization that commits to a character’s interiority and depth is hard to sustain without the author’s constant, dedicated attention. A novel that begins as a pathos becomes almost entirely a science experiment.
The story begins with a hybrid of Panit and Han, a physical fusion of personalities, using the word “ghost” in a morbid way. As the hybrid yearns for his child and encounters a destructive love affair, the scene is reminiscent of Han and Prasart’s relationship, but now with less impact. As the diary passes from hand to hand in the future, the pages fade and the writer feels more and more lost.
As the story moves further into the future, the structure becomes less clear. The story jumps between time and character perspectives, but it often lacks a connecting tissue, conveyed to the reader through expository dialogue. I would have liked to feel more of a tension between the growing dominance of AI and the massive drain that technology has on resources and the theft of people’s intellectual property and labor. These issues exist, but are mostly just speculation.
One of the things that makes the novel all the more difficult to understand is the blurring of the scenes. For the most part, Hoare doesn’t really explain much about the future setting beyond noticing that there are “trees” and “rocks.” Perhaps most glaring for readers of modern sci-fi is how Hoare barely mentions the evolution and impacts of the climate crisis. Instead of exploring these rougher aspects, he all but erases them with the device of widespread nuclear war. While genocidal warfare is certainly hellish, the harshness of it is blown away, making the future feel less real and fully realized.
The novel has a long section written from the perspective of Delta, the nanomachine-raised daughter figure of Panit Han. Delta has just done terrible things to humanity, but the weight of her actions is barely felt in the storyline, which is mostly dialogue that rationalizes the future rather than sensationalism or over-the-topness.
Are we really resigned to our doom and simply forging ahead, hoping to find some joy before the end? This familiar tone that creeps into the text seems there to please the reader and ease the pain of losing our sense of self. I often wished the words were sharper.
Writing about the effects of poetry is not the same as being poetry. Towards eternity It’s poetry, until entropy sets in. By the novel’s end, beloved Han’s progress has waned and grown elusive. The burning heart of the story, the relationship so beautifully depicted in the earlier chapters, is a distant flame that no longer feels its heat. What makes us uniquely human is simply too far gone.
