Miller Place writer Erika Swyler talks about 'We Lived on the Horizon'

Long Island native Erika Swyler's third novel, “We Lived on the Horizon” (Atria, $27.99), is speculative fiction set in a post-climate-change future in an isolated city called Bulwark, run by a central artificial intelligence that connects to the homes of the residents and controls their environments. Think Google Home on steroids. Its central characters are 60-somethings Enita and Helen — a bioprosthetic surgeon and a historian, as well as former partners, now best friends. As the book, which comes out on Tuesday, opens, something unusual has happened in Bulwark — there’s been a murder.

An early rave in Kirkus Reviews praised Swyler’s “combination of mystery, romance, and science fiction” and “seemingly impossible amount of sophisticated worldbuilding using an economy of vibrant, graceful prose.” We caught up with Swyler, a docent at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, via Zoom from her home in the Miller Place area.

What was the inspiration for this novel?

I was listening to a piece on NPR about extreme altruists, like people who donate kidneys to strangers, and thinking about how altruism supports societies. The society in my book doesn't use money. It values people's contribution via what they give to the city through labor in “life credits.” Say it took 10 hours of work to make a particular product: you would pay for this with 10 hours that you put in. People with dangerous jobs or jobs that require lots of education have greater reserves of credit. There’s also a class of people, called Saints, who have inherited worth from the founders who built the city.

And there’s also people who are career organ donors, right?

Because Bulwark is built on poisoned land and life spans have shortened, organ transplants are a central part of the medical system. People who feel a calling to donate are called Body Martyrs. But inevitably those sorts of people get exploited. When you read enough history, you realize most societies start with good intent. Unfortunately, as a species, there’s a tendency for our utopias to turn into some sort of hell. Yet that doesn't mean that the people with best intentions don't still exist.

And artists! Included among the functional divisions of Bulwark — districts of vendors, growers, textilers, construction workers — there’s an Arts District.

Perhaps I'm biased because I'm a writer, and because I came out of theater, but I believe art keeps us alive. When you look at people who are in distress over various world crises and political climates, you find everyone looking to the arts for comfort. What’s your comfort watch? Your comfort read? What art do you love? Keeping that part of your spirit alive is as important as feeding yourself. It's essential for life. The machine consciousness that runs Bulwark is aware of that. It may not understand why humans need this supplement, but they need this supplement. Vitamin D does them good. So does opera.

Your protagonist, Enita, is a member of the Sainted class, and she’s both a kvetchy old lady and a morally driven medical scientist. How did she evolve in your mind?

I don't particularly like viewing groups of people as monoliths, so I wanted to explore whether it’s possible for someone from an extremely wealthy background to also be empathetic and want to do good. How does she behave when exposed to real societal circumstances outside of her own world?

And how does her robot — if that’s the right word — Nix fit in?

Nix is Enita’s sentient house system and surgical assistant. They were Enita’s grandfather’s system and helped raise Enita, almost as her nanny. I wanted to play around with the parent-child relationship, and how these roles often switch. Enita also sees Nix as a way to preserve a legacy of good without having a child.

Ah, this brings up the interesting way pronouns are used in the book. Nix is a they — but is that because they are nonbinary?

Nix uses “they” to express plural consciousness — multiple voices at once. That’s what I imagine machine thinking will be. They are connected to Parallax, the central consciousness of the city. But there are also nonbinary characters in the book who use “they” in that sense. My dream was to write a book where none of it — pronouns, gender, sexual orientation — is a big deal. It’s just part of the fabric of life.