We Lived on the Horizon by Erika Swyler: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler (Atria 9781668049594, $28.99, 336pp, hc) January 2025. Cover design by Laywan Kwan.

The ingredients of Erika Swyler’s We Lived On the Horizon are familiar enough: embodied AI, a highly stratified society, a postapocalyptic city os­sifying from techno-utopia to classist nightmare. But Swyler’s combination feels fresh; the main characters here move almost, though not entirely, outside the “real” plot, the revolution planners and resisters, that might otherwise have dominated the narrative. What we get instead is a fascinat­ing glimpse of divergent consciousness, troubling questions of bodily autonomy, and an ambivalent but thoughtful consideration of historical debt.

Set generations in the future, after unspecified but massive environmental disaster, We Lived on the Horizon takes place in the walled city of Bulwark. Powerful artificial intelligences coordi­nate its functioning, huge walls keep out the toxic winds and other dangers, and a rigid system of inheritance and debt determines one’s place in its society. Those whose ancestors contributed most to the city’s founding and survival are honored as “Saints,” a pampered elite who rarely interact with the workers keeping the farms and machines running in the current day. One exception is Saint Enita Malovis, popularly known as “Stitch-Skin”, a medical prodigy who fixes up anyone who asks, free of charge. Alongside her former lover and the artificial intelligence that Enita is installing in a humanoid body, she finds herself caught up in the edges of a burgeoning revolution that threatens – or promises – bloody upheaval for Bulwark’s society.

Nix, Enita’s artificial assistant, is one of the novel’s primary viewpoint characters, and they’re a fascinating one. They’re much more a work-in-progress than the average fictional android, Enita more considerate – though imperfectly – than the average Doctor Frankenstein; while Nix does want to function in human society they’re not seeking to be a human, exactly. Swyler does an excellent job infusing Nix’s viewpoint and speech with hints of their nonhuman cognition: synaesthetic perception, neurodivergent habits, and a constant source of estrangement and wonder at the idio­syncrasies of the human body. Nix has an odd role in Bulwark’s great upheaval, in something like a compromise between machines and human­ity – Mass Effect aficionados, the green ending works here, I promise – but it’s their relation to the body, their own and others, that makes them vital to the novel.

The most troubling and interesting intersec­tion of bodies and politics, however, is in Neren, one of Enita’s patients. When she’s brought in, unconscious, with terrible wounds from a col­lapsing building, Enita winds up replacing her leg and applying other nanomechanical cures before realizing that Neren is a “Body Martyr.” An old tradition in Bulwark, Body Martyrs are unmodi­fied people who offer up their organs and tissues to Saints, even though artificial replacements are available. They’re an almost too-obvious metaphor for how the rich prey on the bodies and trick the minds of the poor; but Neren has also chosen this for herself, and is distraught that Enita’s interven­tion has taken away this core aspect of her identity without her consent. How Neren, Enita, and Nix navigate this medical and ethical conundrum is one of the strangest and most potent throughlines in the novel.

Although the bulk of the novel is framed from Saints’ perspective, it builds up a fairly damning picture of their society, and it’s interesting how it keeps that judgment visible but at a slight distance for much of the story. Bulwark’s economy and class structure, based on “hours” and “balances” of life, with its “Saintly” overclass of inherited wealth and mostly invisible underclass laboring to keep the city viable, is easy enough to read as a mirror on our own society, and it lets us see and feel the anger of being kept in poverty in what could be a utopia, of being kept in ill-health though medical marvels could be readily made available. The Eloi might be more cultured, more fun as subjects, but one gets the feeling that We Lived On the Horizon has plenty of sympathy for the Morlocks.

While much of the novel’s focus stays pretty tightly on Enita, Nyx, and a few of their acquain­tances, it also jumps elsewhere enough to give the reader the outlines of the revolution shaping up in Bulwark. There are several points when it seems like our main characters are about to plunge into this bigger (and literal) plot – when they begin to piece together why Saints are being murdered, when they realize that the system seems to be complicit in its own destruction – but by and large they stay fixated on their immediate and individual problems. It’s an interesting approach to depicting massive social change, arguably a realistic one – most people just live their lives, and only later see that they were participating in his­tory. We Lived On the Horizon has rich settings, well-wrought characters, and some really fascinat­ing perspectives; where it’s strongest is where it shows the forces of history at work in them.

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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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