A Cerebral, Literary Thriller about AI and Humanity

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In the cerebral literary thriller Stop All the Clocks, Mona Veigh is a brilliant technologist and poetry scholar who created an AI program named Hildegard, that she has trained to recognize and write poetry. After the mysterious death of her colleague Avram Parr, whose company acquired Hildegard, Mona has renounced technology and isolated herself on Roosevelt Island. When Mona starts to suspect there might be more to Parr’s death than meets the eye, she reenters society and embarks on a quest to discover the truth. 

The book deftly explores the very real tension between humanity and technology. Various characters in the book represent these two forces, with Mona in the middle struggling to make sense of her creation’s impact in a world of techno villains and disruptors. 

As Mona gets more deeply enmeshed in the Parr mystery, she revisits favorite poems as sources of comfort. These contrast with Hildegard’s cold and eerie poetry output that appears throughout the book. Poetry and language play a strong role in Mona’s internal conflict between what is truly real and what is just pattern recognition and code. 

The narrative shifts between a page-turning mystery and abstract philosophical musings on poetry, language, technology, and humanity. It’s a thought provoking and original story, but at times dense and difficult to interpret, so it didn’t always land for me. 

Thank you to Skyhorse Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. 

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