The Melancholy Of A World Gone Cyberpunk

Noah Kumin's "Stop All The Clocks"

Around the time Stephen Colbert was just beginning his tenure on the Late Show, he had Ricky Gervais on. Gervais is open about his atheism, as is Colbert about his Catholicism. Colbert asked him, “Do you want to debate the existence of God?” Gervais said he would. Colbert said something like, “Does reality require a demiurge in order to come into being?” And Gervais, instead of answering the question, said (paraphrasing here), “The thing is, if civilization were to crumble, and we needed to start again — the material we’d need to do that would be the scientific stuff. Not the religious. If we didn’t have the religious, we could get everything going again.” What’s more, the implication went, civilization would be missing the kind of thinking that’s held it back for so long.

After reading Stop All The Clocks, I couldn’t help but think that maybe Gervais had that backwards. Maybe what’s essential to civilization isn’t so much the technological marvels, with their concomitant desire to improve everything in slow but certain steps, but our connection with the numinous, the ineffable. After all, when we strip away our air conditioned homes, our medicine — what do we have left? What was it that sustained us for all those millennia we spent dying of preventable disease, hunted by predators, vulnerable to disaster?

And in our current state of affairs, we have to ask the further question of what this constant technological improvement is actually doing, and who is it that’s allowing it to do these things? Furthermore, why? What kind of utopian ambitions underly the desire for acceleration? And what is it we’re at risk of losing?

In case it wasn’t obvious, Stop All The Clocks is asking big questions. It does so in a way that mixes the suspense of a thriller with the content of a philosophical novel, featuring conspiracies within conspiracies, more paranoia than a bad acid trip, and developments that make you question the genre of history itself. Not every implementation of thriller tropes is successful, but it’s to the book’s credit that even when it occasionally strains credulity, it remains gripping, fascinating, and all too real.

The basic plot of the book is this: A young woman named Mona Veigh has dropped out of the technological side of life. She studied poetry and programming in college and went on to develop an artificial intelligence that, theoretically, could learn to write poetry. This venture was bought by a man named Avram Parr, one of those Silicon Valley types who treads the line between autistic and psychopathic. But after he killed himself, Mona took a buyout, went as off the grid as one can in NYC, and spent her days reading. Soon enough, she encounters two mysterious individuals who accidentally let it slip that perhaps Parr didn’t kill himself, but was murdered. Mona decides to investigate this and uncovers a vast conspiracy where the future itself is at stake.

What works really well here is how Kumin works through the central philosophical tension: He hints at a kind of Neoplatonic reality that can be accessed through literature, and which will be lost if we continue our constant optimization of everything. This is in contrast to the accelerationism of its villains, who can’t quite grasp spiritual truths. They reject literature because it doesn’t make sense in this very robotic, psychopathic worldview of theirs: For them, the goal is longer life, more evolution, increased efficiency.

Of course, Kumin doesn’t hide which of these two positions he favours. But he manages to work through these ideas in such a natural way that he avoids the polemical. In part, this is because the novel serious considers the inevitability of losing our sense of the numinous. Mona sees it all around her, and early on. She’s even partly responsible for hastening it, since she’s the one who designed the poetry-writing A.I. to begin with — although whether poetry is something optimizable, or the A.I. becomes something interesting as a result of encountering poetry, is left unanswered. Still, there is a palpable sense of mourning throughout, as society seems more ready for acceleration than it does for a rediscovery of the arts. And it’s this feeling of the transcendent reality slipping away that gives what’s essentially a philosophical dilemma an aura of atmospheric dread.

The paranoid thriller aspects of the story help in this regard also, although there are occasional moments when the plot hinges on revelations that come too easily. For example, Mona first hears that Parr may have been murdered via one character’s slip of the tongue. Another moment features Mona piecing together details in such a way that it seems impossible she could have done so; she, frankly, doesn’t have enough information to draw the conclusion she does. And still one more revelation is given to her via what amounts to a long speech. These moments come a little too easily and would have been more interesting if she’d had to work for them.

But if the thriller elements don’t always cohere, its relationship to genre is nonetheless one of its more intriguing aspects. In addition to being a kind of thriller, there are whole parts of the book that wouldn’t be out of place in cyberpunk. To go into more detail would involve significant spoilers, but suffice it to say that the conspiracy’s main thrust could have come from a Bruce Sterling novel (and one of them in particular). Furthermore, an underground lair makes an appearance, which reminded me of something from a James Bond movie (or even — and I mean this in the best way because I genuinely love this movie — Ed Wood’s Bride Of The Monster).

If that sounds ridiculous to you, I assure you this was my first reaction also. But after sitting with this, I realized that while some of these science fiction and comic book tropes might seem campy, they are very much happening in the world. It’s no longer science fiction to talk about unleashing the deterritorializing effects of technology in order to create new versions of human beings, untethered to all the things that ail us. People are having very real discussions about whether we could make a computer that’s indistinguishable from a god. Some of our techno-optimists are even getting blood transfusions from healthy eighteen-year-olds in order to prolong their lives.

And the underground lair? Well, what of that doom bunker Zuckerburg has in New Zealand?

There’s a significant shock in recognizing this aspect of the book. What appears to be genre-bending, in other words, becomes something much stranger: The realization that it’s history that’s become genre-bended. Cyberpunk is happening all around us.

All of this should signal that this is a book with serious ambitions. It’s not navel-gazing, it’s not particularly comforting, and it takes its role as a novel quite seriously indeed. Many readers will see in it a less Byzantine Pynchon novel, and that wouldn’t be far from the truth. It’s about the things that are happening around us, it has a perspective on what that means, it has a sense of what it values and what might be lost to time. These are the kind of things novel used to aspire to do, and it’s exciting to see this happening again.

And perhaps, if you’re like me, it made you want to put the phone down just long enough to read the works of a Medieval mystic, and wonder what it might be like to search again for the numinous.