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A Novel
by Erika Swyler
The acclaimed author of the "dazzling" (Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times bestselling author) 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.
"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 Reviews (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
"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
This information about We Lived on the Horizon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Erika Swyler is the bestselling author of the novels Light from Other Stars, The Book of Speculation, and We Lived on the Horizon. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Catapult, LitHub, The New York Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she lives on Long Island, New York, with her husband and a mischievous house rabbit.
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