Forthcoming: We Lived On The Horizon

The acclaimed author of The Book of Speculation returns with an engrossing new novel about a bio-prosthetic surgeon and her personal AI as they are drawn into a revolution.

The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind’s last stronghold, called the Sainted.

Saint Enita Malovis, long accustomed to luxury, feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s hidden underclass and the programs that impose and maintain order.

A complex, imaginative, and unforgettable novel, We Lived on the Horizon grapples with concepts as varied as the human desire for utopia, body horror, and what the future holds for humanity and machine alike.

“Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon delivers everything I crave from great science fiction: a pulse-quickening plot, an endless stream of imaginative wonders, and the kind of moral clarity that brings to mind the grand ethical visions of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. This is an unforgettable novel of ideas, keen to the complex interplays between love and sacrifice, complicity and community.” —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

"Kaleidoscopic and incisive in its themes, We Lived on the Horizon detonates the imperfect symbiosis between A.I. and what it means to be human. From class warfare and systems of oppression to reflections on gender and inherited privilege, Swyler burrows through the walls of genres to critique civilization’s cycles of unrest and the costs of our survival. My favorite kind of novel—philosophical, timely, and brimming with intrigue and speculative flair. I couldn’t put it down." —Sequoia Nagamatsu, bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark