We Lived on the Horizon

Name: We Lived on the Horizon
Author: Erika Swyler

Erika Swyler

Sci-Fi

LGBTQIA+

At a glance

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Post-apocalyptic setting

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Grapples with AI

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Body horror

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Sainted class hierarchy

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.

Don’t just take
our word for it

"Brilliant dystopian novel…Swyler’s elegant, polyphonic narrative juggles many themes, foremost among them human-robot convergence, through ever-shifting perspectives…This is a powerhouse."

- Publishers Weekly, starred review 🌟

"Swyler achieves a seemingly impossible amount of sophisticated worldbuilding using an economy of vibrant, graceful prose. The story transports and transforms, alchemizing a combination of mystery, romance, and science fiction into an impactful exploration of the importance of connection, the evolutionary nature of identity, and the inevitability of revolution. Affecting relationships and a sinuous, kaleidoscopic third-person narrative further define and develop the exquisitely rendered characters. Singularly stunning and stunningly singular."

- Kirkus, starred review

"Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon is a brilliant, nuanced book that is unafraid to wrangle with big ideas—or to remind the reader that even the biggest ideas also affect ordinary lives. It asks us to read beyond the easy answers and dwell in complexity. This novel is exactly the sort of thing that I want science fiction to aspire to. I highly recommend it to fans of Station Eleven or Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life."

- Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

In the center of an arid and cracked stretch of land, cradled by rock spires and hills long ago blasted for stone, the system known as Parallax breathes with wires in their walls, their pulse an ambient current, a tranquil electromagnetic field. They had begun not as a great expanse, but as a spark that grew with the city’s population, as their walls went up. They grew as did trees, from root and branch, burgeoning.

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Parallax is not separate from the city of Bulwark’s residents and has never considered themself to be—the system does not question function or purpose, and they are secure in their reason for existence. They ensure the lives of their residents are bettered. They are their residents. They are the city.

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For a city born of trauma, better is easily defined and measurable: less infant mortality, longer average lifespans, reduction in starvation and stress-related illness, clean water, clean air. Their residents’ longevity increased and their population increased. Biometric indicators of health improved as did the quality of air, water, and food. Within their walls the markers of a successful civilization rose—children, the elderly, and the disabled were cared for. Better is a concept of degrees leading to the dissection of minutiae. Parallax exists because humans are not skilled at differentiating between what is worth changing and what is best forgotten.

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Parallax monitors themself, minding their residents, sorting data streams from the grow houses, following workers as they scan in to begin long days of walking the rows, picking, pulling, spraying, pruning, and tender turning of soil and water. Transport drays move through the gates at regular intervals, their weights steady, cargo…