Erika Swyler’s third novel, We Lived on Horizon (Atria Books, 2025), presents a futuristic world where the last of humanity survives inside a city called Bulwark, which is run by an AI system called Parallax. Enita Malovis should represent Bulwark’s success: She lives a privileged existence earned by her ancestors’ sacrifices and spends her time developing “bio prostheses,” or lab-grown body parts, and an AI assistant, Nix, who can carry on her work. But Enita begins to realize that she represents a system on the verge of collapse. Residents are rising up against a social system that assigns everyone “life debt” and lets the wealthy preserve their own shares; meanwhile, Parallax is beginning to break down.
Told through multiple points of view—including Enita, Nix, and a “Body Martyr” named Neren who works as a living organ donor—We Lived on the Horizon moves from personal questions about caretaking, love, and the limits of intimacy to a larger investigation of how society works and what happens when it stops working.
I recently caught up over email with Swyler to discuss language and information, the promise of home and its potential to become a trap, and how we define humanity.
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The Rumpus: The people of Bulwark live under an intense level of surveillance. Their house systems monitor and analyze everything they do, say, and write—and it’s the systems, in turn, that have the power to share or decline to share information with Parallax and other systems. Enita seems to relish this, almost as a form of intimacy. Is there something to be gained from surveillance, or is Enita naive?
Erika Swyler: As distasteful as I find surveillance, it would be ignorant to think there’s no comfort to be found in it. Enita’s attitude around surveillance is already shockingly prevalent. We see it in anyone who uses a Ring camera, smart appliances, wears a health tracker, or has ever asked a virtual assistant a question. It’s a mixture of naivete and intimacy that we think of as ease and protection. For many brought up in organized religion, the idea of surveillance is baked into existence, which makes the transition to a surveillance state almost no transition at all. There’s a sense of comfort in knowing if something happens, someone is watching. The rub is always who is watching and to what end. Those questions don’t immediately arise when you’ve been raised under surveillance.
Rumpus: Enita’s grandfather, Byron, first created Nix—an AI assistant who can learn and carry on his work creating biosynthetic body parts. Nix reminds Enita that they knew her as a child and helped train her. But at the same time, Enita thinks of Nix as her child—someone to carry on her legacy, with a body modeled to resemble Helen, a former romantic partner. What does this relationship have to say about parents, children, and perhaps what parents want from children?
Swyler: As a childless person, I’m keenly aware of the push for “legacy” in patriarchal societies—children as a means of carrying on a name, a business, all of it. It’s interesting how little “legacy” has historically applied to anyone who isn’t male and how small a role choice plays. People without children are often portrayed as selfish and egotistical, yet there’s relatively little discussion on how choosing to have children can be an act of ego—about carrying on a legacy, your DNA, wanting the experience of parenting for yourself. It’s a hairy question. A friend and fellow writer, Adrienne Celt, mentioned that this book queers the parent–child relationship. I had that in mind because that’s been my experience. If you’ve ever nursed a parent through injury, illness, or end-of-life care, there’s a reversal of roles that’s devastating and rewarding all at once. For myself, in the wake of political upheaval and the onset of the pandemic, I needed to focus on care as the central aspect of any relationship. When we push societal roles aside, what’s left between parents and children is the desire to both care and to be cared for.
Rumpus: Nix and the other computer systems feel very human. They attach color to their communication to suggest tone and emotion and consider how their communication will be received. The systems aren’t open, either. Some share information willingly, some are private, and all see purpose in their communication. How do information and communication define humanity?
Swyler: Language is our species—the idiosyncrasies, the art of it, the impossibility of perfect expression. When writing a book rooted in the machine, the challenge was finding avenues to approachability. Machine language had to be human and not, so I latched on to synesthesia, which seems like a malfunction but is more brain processes overlapping. I latched onto communication’s weaknesses. That’s misinterpretation, misrepresentation, gaps, failures of idiom, translation errors. All those things that happen when you remove the body and place from the voice. Maybe the most human thing we do is try to isolate language and communication from the body—books, print, the internet—yet in doing so it gets even more wrapped up in the physical and becomes how we broadly define ourselves, our cultures, our bodies, our history.
Rumpus: Enita creates exquisite flesh-and-blood prosthetics for transplant and limb replacement, but the residents of Bulwark prefer parts from living donors or “Body Martyrs.” The Body Martyr Neren receives compensation for her donations but considers donating a calling rather than a job. What does all of this say about their values and our own ideas about authenticity and labor?
Swyler: Much of this book came out of extreme and ongoing political anger and acknowledging that governments rely on altruists to keep people alive. They must, or there would be no one left to wield power over. That anger is again fresh. This book is also a distinct product of this era of global capitalism. We know that so much of what we enjoy is made under horrendous labor conditions and creates waste that will outlive our species. The wealthy have always valued things by how difficult they are for the average person to obtain either by rarity, price point, or both. What’s more rare or costly than an organ from another human being? What’s more valuable than a life? I’m as complicit in this kind of consumption as most—but that doesn’t mean we can’t think about labor and consumption and try to operate differently. So, I included a toymaker, Sinjin, as someone who makes things in a more immediately tangible and mindful way.
Rumpus: Related to that, I keep coming back to the titled social roles of “Saint” and “Body,” and this being set in a city run by machines. What are these categories getting at?
Swyler: The city is and isn’t run by machines. At the heart of all machines are humans who build and program them, and we’re a strange species. Just look at the computing concept of “master” and “slave” drives. That’s not a machine’s term for itself; that’s human thinking, and it’s terrible. “The Sainted” came out of watching too many memorial services for tragedies that few living people have a real connection to. We play a kind of telephone game with symbolic grief that warps events until the concept of the event is gone, and what’s left is the vague notion of past sacrifice. That is, to me, the idea of a saint, someone whose long-ago loss we revere yet don’t grasp in a real way. As for “Body Martyrs,” the more you read about human rights, the more the body pops up, governments’ impacts on women’s bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, bodies of color, disabled bodies. So, the book’s language and roles became about past action versus present action and who is capable of what. I want to pick at who uses their body and who exists as an idea.
Rumpus: Nix, Neren, and Davet—a human who interfaces with Parallax—all ask us to consider how our bodies create our sense of self. How do our bodies make us who we are?
Swyler: It’s tempting to believe that thoughts and emotions are separate from your body, but as a chronic depressive, I promise the body is the emotion, is being alive. Every emotion and trauma is experienced by and expresses itself through the body. Unfortunately, our bodies still dictate how we are treated in any society. We’re written on the second we take a breath—by our skin color, our reproductive organs, able-bodiedness or disability—and the views our cultures take for any of these things. That treatment forms personality and beliefs as much as anything. I’m who I am because of this body and the ways it’s been ruled for and against.
Rumpus: Bulwark’s society is built on the idea of usefulness: you get credits for contributing and pay with credits to receive resources. Enita and Nix are also personally driven by being useful to others; Enita’s former partner, Helen, warns them that caring for someone is not the same as happiness. How can we imagine reciprocal relationships without giving in to exploitation?
Swyler: I came to this idea of usefulness and societal contribution as currency after being fully steeped in years of “eat the rich” and “late-stage capitalism” discourse. They’re understandable sentiments, but I kept thinking about what’s required to do things differently. As long as power dynamics exist, exploitation exists. I find that focusing on the idea of care is the closest thing I can find to an antidote for the exploitation spiral. Sometimes that’s about a very small circle around you. How are you going to care for your elders? Young ones? Loved ones? True caring is reciprocal in the sense of value it affords, in connection. When you dig into altruism, that’s part of where you wind up—a sense of purpose. That’s not exactly happiness, but it’s adjacent.
Rumpus: Helen warns us that societies must continuously change and argues that change is good. What can we learn from this attitude?
Swyler: You don’t need to look much further than the Second Amendment to see how static rules harm. I spend time volunteering at an art and history museum, which routinely reminds me that in just two hundred years, the world remakes itself multiple times. Changes in science, medicine, culture, demographics, and ethos are inevitable. To not adapt governance alongside that is to hasten not just the demise of people but those who govern them. We’re in an extraordinarily difficult moment, yet it’s the exact moment that should force change.
Rumpus: Enita is very conscious that Nix’s human behavior—specifically, their ability to convey affection—is mimicry, but she also thinks that “Mimicry isn’t so separate from being.” Where is that line? Can we ever know?
Swyler: I don’t think we can ever know. The entire acting profession relies on us being unable to tell. During college, I studied an acting approach that posits all emotion and performance live in the body and that physicality and gesture lead to emotion. In that way, imitating and pretending become being. There is a moment when a baby might stop mirroring a parent’s smile and move to inhabiting the emotion that makes a smile—but I don’t know that anyone can pinpoint that exact moment, even in their own child.
Rumpus: Enita’s world is so grounded within her house that I didn’t even realize we spent the whole first third of the novel there until she decides that Nix must learn by traveling through the city. How did you approach place and plot structure?
Swyler: I spent the early pandemic working on this novel and I’m sure that contributed to the beginning’s closed-room nature. Claustrophobia is one of my recurring themes; I enjoy playing with how it warps perspective. My characters have lived in space shuttles, inside wagons, and now a walled city. It was important to lean into that cramped isolation when it came to writing about class. Class is limiting. To highlight divides, you have to define borders. For the Sainted, that’s their homes, their protected information bubbles, and the literal wall around the city. When it came to structure, as Enita’s understanding of her world expands, the settings and the book expand. I love books that bloom, and I think this one does.
Rumpus: Your previous novels, Light from Other Stars and The Book of Speculation, use both fantasy and science fiction. In terms of craft and process, do you approach writing fantasy—let’s say, the supernatural—and science fiction—let’s say, more or less possible realities—in different ways?
Swyler: I tend to not focus on genre when writing because I don’t find it helpful. I’m an omnivorous reader, so what I write doesn’t fit neatly into one category. Genres get burdened with questions about worldbuilding, prediction, and accuracy—particularly if you’re writing something speculative—but I’m most concerned with taking apart the present. Sometimes the best tool for that is extrapolating on current tech; sometimes it’s history and folklore; sometimes it’s pure invention. My most steady craft technique is to focus on what I’m writing “against” and read as much as I can of that. For this novel, I read and reread a lot of golden age science fiction, fiction with “insane” computers, fiction that leaned into objectification. I mixed in more recent fiction and journalism on people developing and interacting with AI and robots. The reading made me think about what autonomy is and who gets it. That’s less a genre question and more a universal question.
Rumpus: Chat GPT launched in the fall of 2022. Were you already writing this book? How did you write and revise a story about AI alongside AI’s explosion and the discourse around it?
Swyler: In the fall of ’22, I was about to go on submission with this book, so it was largely finished. I’d been reading about LLMs for years, so I knew something would be popping up, but not quite the capitalistic explosion of it. By the time I was on submission I was panicked that people would already be burned out on AI. What I’ve written is very different from our current AI models. My goal when writing anything in the science fiction realm is to make sure it’s human-forward, which current generative AI is not. I’ve done my best to make clear that this is about consciousness and what a machine moral code might look like, not algorithms and theft.
Rumpus: In an essay for Writer’s Chronicle, you wrote: “Some of the best writing on damning human exploitation lies firmly in the realm of science fiction.” Many writers think that fiction writers, and especially science and speculative fiction writers, should write toward a moral or political purpose. How do you incorporate that into your process, if at all?
Swyler: I don’t usually embark on a project with a specific moral or political aim, as that can narrow what I’ll discover through writing. Do I wind up there? Always. I play with allegory, so it would be difficult to avoid moral purpose. But I work in areas where there aren’t clear answers. Our political and media environment makes monoliths out of groups of individuals, which makes dehumanizing easy, so I tease out things we’re used to overlooking. It is, unfortunately, an extraordinary privilege in this country to be able to write for a living. There’s a real obligation to make it less of a privilege and more of an accessible way of being for people. I think about that in my process. Art and books have been a lifeline for me. So, my political and moral stance in my writing and the writing community is that there’s a responsibility to be a lifeline for someone—obviously not everyone, but someone.
Rumpus: In the same essay, you wrote: “As used in programs like ChatGPT, generative AI exploits humans to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” Is this novel a correction to how AI’s creators and users currently imagine it? Is it a warning about the dangers of AI, or is it both and/or more?
Swyler: I genuinely hope this novel is both a thought on correction and a warning. A lot of users of current AI don’t grasp that it doesn’t work like human thinking. So, I’m digging into what machine thinking might be if we reach a place of machine self-awareness. It’s a warning in that I believe a data-driven society focused on doing the most good for the most people has a different solution to the trolley problem than the one proponents of generative AI appear to have in mind. Simply, it takes a lot of data manipulation to come up with an answer that allows for extreme wealth to exist.
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Author photograph courtesy of Erika Swyler
