This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Anton Hur, translator of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop.

About If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop: An elderly woman stranded in a defunct space station recounts her life story to a visitor as she waits for a vessel that may never arrive. A man comes across a company called Emotional Solids that sells emotions as material products—love as a piece of chocolate, sadness as a smooth stone, anger as a glass paperweight—and tries to understand why people would want to purchase any negative emotions. When an enigmatic artist reveals long-forgotten messages from beyond through her wildly original paintings portraying a planet from a time long before humanity formed, a team of researchers investigate if this planet truly existed and if so, how did this artist know of it? After a pregnant woman’s estranged mother dies suddenly, her avatar disappears from the library of lost souls where the digital minds of the deceased are stored—and the woman is forced, for the first time, to endeavor to understand her mother. In a future utopian society where gene selection has been made uniform and all those with imperfections are cast aside, one woman seeks the truth about the history of her isolated world. And when a young woman undertakes a never-before-accomplished journey through a wormhole, she must reckon with the legacy of her aunt, who vanished mysteriously days before she was meant to begin the same pilgrimage.

About Anton Hur: A translator and author working in Seoul. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, and raised in British Hong Kong, Ethiopia, and Thailand, but mostly in Korea. Author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). Repped by Safae El-Ouahabi at RCW.

This week’s picks:

• Anton: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
• Tracy: Milk Oolong Full-Leaf Tea
• Patrick: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Netflix)

Links:

• Anton Hur on Instagram
• Tracy Townsend on BluSky
• Patrick Hester on Instagram
• The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2026 Patrick Hester

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