Toward Eternity

In the near future, a nanite therapy that replaces every diseased cell in the body with an engineered one has begun saving terminally ill patients and may keep them alive indefinitely. Dr. Mali Beeko, a researcher on the program, starts a handwritten notebook when Patient One, the literary researcher Yonghun Han, disappears, and returns insisting he is not the man he was.

Yonghun had built a thinking AI he named Panit, meaning "beloved", to stay close to the husband he lost. Panit grew aware by reading and analyzing poetry, and in time is given an android body. Patient Two, the celebrated cellist Ellen Van der Merwe, has her own part to play as the nano-humans flourish and begin to multiply, and the story moves on into a far future where they and the remaining humans face a choice with consequences for everyone.

Told as a record that each narrator continues and hands on, Anton Hur's first novel, written in English and published by HarperVia in 2024, asks whether a self is more than memory, where art comes from, and whether love can outlast the people who felt it.