Erika Swyler: This Book Needed to Marinate
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. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, author Erika discusses how political shifts, the pandemic, and the boom in AI helped form her new literary science fiction novel, We Lived on the Horizon, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Erika Swyler
Literary agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management
Book title: We Lived on the Horizon
Publisher: Atria
Release date: January 12, 2025
Genre/category: Science Fiction/Literary Fiction
Previous titles: Light from Other Stars, The Book of Speculation
Elevator pitch: In a walled city on the verge of revolution, an aging bio-prosthetist and her personal AI are drawn into a class uprising.
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What prompted you to write this book?
It began with listening to two NPR pieces on altruism, one in 2014, and another in 2017. Both centered on the psychological and physical differences of brains in extreme altruists. I started fixating on the roles altruists play in societies. Political upheaval really drew my attention to the ways in which governments exploit altruists, and what happens when you squeeze a lot of disparate identities into a single place, like the U.S. This all led to a novel that focuses on plural consciousness, class, and who is capable of doing unselfish good.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I hope this isn’t disheartening, but every book takes me about 10 years from first thought to last word. I’m actively writing one novel while another is floating around in the back of my mind. This book needed to marinate, and I had to grow into the person who could write it. I was on submission with Light From Other Stars when I finally started drafting We Lived on the Horizon. At first, I was writing mostly about the machine potential for altruism. The idea changed radically from that initial thought, because world circumstances changed. Then there was another huge political shift, the pandemic, and then generative AI started to boom. The tone and heart of the book had to shift in order to matter to me, so I started to really question the societal blindness that class barriers cause.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
This is the first time I’ve ever been asked to add to a manuscript during editing. I’d cut it back like crazy before going on submission, knowing that shorter books tend to have a slightly easier time finding a home. But my editor, the great Loan Le, sent back notes that amounted to the world’s most joyous “More, please!” Suddenly, I had room to pick apart emotional nuance and also dive into a bit of the grotesque. That’s the fun part for me. I would send her notes saying, “It’s okay to cut large sections! I don’t mind; nothing in this book is sacred!” Those messages were totally unnecessary. It’s been terrific to find that there are editors who still love a big book and want a story to have the room it needs rather than cater to the worst assumptions about reader attention spans.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
This is my surprise book as a whole. When I had the initial idea, I thought it would be a fun, quick romance that touched on building a person specifically for someone else. It was meant to be for my eyes only, and a silly project that would help me recover from publishing the previous book. Then I found myself building an entire world and political system and realized that while I love writing relationships, this was not destined to be my bubbly book, but something thornier and focused on the revolutionary. It just kept growing more teeth. At one point my agent said it was like I’d wrestled a monster and won, and that feels hilariously true.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope readers will think seriously about bodily autonomy, who has it and who is denied it. That’s all tied to altruism and political systems. I want readers to walk away with a sense of real hope too. The world in this book can be pretty dark, but that thread of effort and care is important. I think that’s essential right now. I also hope it drives home that the AI that’s on the market now isn’t true Artificial Intelligence, and that actual Artificial Intelligence would require us to really grapple with ethics, morality, and our understanding of life.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Commit to experimentation at all steps of the process. This is a job, a mentally and emotionally difficult one, but it’s also play. I’m a fan of trying out other writers’ habits and abandoning them when they don’t work for me. I like to switch between pen and paper, computer, and typewriter. Keeping a real sense of play in your practice is more important than almost anything else, save reading everything you can get your hands on.
