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-Hello, and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm Nancy Pearl. My guest today is Erika Swyler
and we'll be talking about her brand new novel,
"We Lived on the Horizon."
Erika, it's just a pleasure to talk to you.
I loved this novel.
Where -- I know that you write speculative fiction
or do you prefer just science fiction?
How do you define what you write?
-It's kind of difficult.
So this book I guess I would call speculative fiction,
though some folks are calling it sci-fi.
I kind of don't define what I write
because I don't really know what I'm writing
until I'm in the middle of it.
I'm an omnivorous reader
and I think that comes out in the writing,
so there's a lot of, you know,
there's elements of mystery here, a little bit of romance,
a little bit of horror, and a lot of science fiction.
So it's that mix, so I guess speculative.
-Did you read science fiction fantasy as a child
and did you come into this naturally, one might say?
-So I, again, as a child, I was an omnivorous reader,
so my parents sort of let me free roam in their bookshelves,
so there was a lot of science fiction in there.
There was a lot of Bradbury, and Asimov,
and all of that golden age sort of stuff
that my father had collected.
So that was my first real introduction to it.
And I think I just remember the other day,
when as a child,
my mom read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
to my sister and me.
And I think she got really bored with children's literature,
at the time,
and decided to read something
she thought was going to be fun for her.
And so, you know,
that's really entwined in my understanding
of books and literature
is that fun sort of science fiction feel to it.
But it was also taking in a lot of other literary fiction,
things like way above my reading comprehension,
at the time, missing the entire point of things
but just having a good time accessing all sorts of books.
-There is something
to be said for that kind of reading freely
and just experiencing, yeah. -Yeah, I really think so.
There's a -- I know there's a real movement to keep,
you know, children's books for children,
adult books for adults,
but the great thing about being kids
is you don't get what you're not supposed to get.
-Exactly.
-It just goes right over your head.
And, you know, when you access these other books,
you just get a whole idea that there is just a big,
grownup, exciting world,
and, you know, you start to read up towards it.
And I think it winds up being good for your development.
So I loved having access to all of those books.
I think it made me a better reader,
and eventually, a better writer.
-I think that what you said is something I've always believed
and I was a children's librarian in the early years of my career.
But it's that children get exactly what their level is
in a book, and they skip pages if they don't understand it,
and that's kind of great, reassuring.
-When something clicks years later,
it becomes this funny moment of realization.
Oh, I entirely missed that whole point and now here it is
and I understand this book more.
It lets you rediscover things.
So I'm a huge fan of just letting kids graze
as far as they read.
-And I feel the same way about adult reading,
too, that we, you know, we kind of head to a book store with --
or a library with a book or two in mind.
But I remember just, you know,
wonderful days of browsing the library shelves
just looking for a title that, you know, jumps out at me
or something like that.
Is that the kind of reader you are?
-Oh, absolutely.
I spent much of my high school years,
after school, I would just go to the library.
You know, there are times when you feel like,
ugh, I just don't want to go home.
I can't go home so I would go to the library.
And I just remember reading just stacks and stacks of books that,
you know, I wasn't even taking them out.
I was just sitting there reading the whole book
and just putting it right back.
And I think I went through an entire contemporary fiction
rack one summer and it just felt like total freedom.
So when people say, "Oh, you know, have you read this?
Have you read this?" Probably.
It was jammed in there at one point in time.
-Right.
-And I think that makes for interesting brains
and it makes for just a lot of discovery.
And so I find it a little bit --
I find genre and designations like that a little bit difficult
because to me it's all one story in the sense
that it's all this is what being human is.
This is what people are so
why are we breaking these things into groups?
And I think that kind of looking for one or two books
or having a certain flavor of thing
in mind winds up being really limiting.
As far as just, you know, your experience of books
and your experience of the world.
So I'm a huge fan of just pick it up, whatever it is.
-Yeah, I always wished that somebody would give me a library
and let me arrange it exactly the way I wanted.
So put, you know,
cookbooks with cooking memoirs and cooking novel,
you know, novels where the main character.
Or, you know, have your book,
"We Lived on the Horizon,"
next to books about other fiction that has AI and robots,
but nonfiction, as well.
Because I think we look for the same thing in fiction
as we do in -- or in nonfiction as we do in fiction.
-I think so.
I think, also, when you're writing fiction,
nonfiction is feeding into it.
The world is feeding into it. -Yes.
-And, I mean, hopefully,
one wants people making science is writing a nonfiction
to also be taking in the art of fiction to feed that, as well.
They should all be in communication.
So I think when we separate them,
that makes that communication a little bit more difficult.
So, I mean, this book came out of a lot of fiction
and it came out of a lot of nonfiction,
as well, and a lot of just what's going on in the world.
So it would be nice if we could arrange things and books
that are in dialog with other books
but that becomes a little more difficult when you're, you know,
searching for a specific title.
-What -- that's a great way of arranging books.
So what books -- so here's what I thought when I was reading,
"We Lived on the Horizon."
I thought it was in dialog.
I love that, Erika. I love that idea of books.
We -- I thought it was in a dialog with Isaac Asimov
and the whole notion of the three laws of robotics.
And I wanted to -- which are, I happen to have them right here,
a robot cannot harm a human or allow a human to come to harm.
A robot must obey human orders
unless those orders conflict with the first law.
A robot must protect itself
unless that protection conflicts with the first or second law.
And I'm not saying that's that how you developed Nix or --
who is the AI, the robot in "We Lived on the Horizon."
But it seemed to me that that underlays so much of every --
all writing that we do about -- especially fiction,
that we do about AI and robots.
-Very much so. -What do you think?
-I think if you're writing anything
in the science fiction realm that is dealing with a robot
or an AI, it's impossible to avoid Asimov.
That's sort of what everything is built off of.
So I wanted to take that,
because in going back and re-reading Asimov,
stuff I loved as a kid but didn't really have the power
to see where I fit in it at the time.
I felt like it wasn't really welcoming for people like me,
perspectives like mine,
or perspectives too far outside of Asimov's own.
I'll put it that way.
So I wanted to really focus on, well, what do I do to,
you know, complicate those laws.
Those first two laws contradict each other
and so what do we do in that contradiction?
What do we do if we're thinking about making technology
that really is capable of altruism
and from a human perspective, from a planet perspective?
What does that look like?
And what does it do when it runs up against the problem
that is humanity
because we as humans are not terribly altruistic
about ourselves a lot of times. -Right.
-So, you know, having these laws
that are sort of in conflict is a real place to build from.
And so that was what I took from Asimov
and it's also in dialog with a lot of Ursula K.
Le Guin books,
"The Dispossessed," and "Left Hand of Darkness," specifically.
So I was thinking Le Guin is great for, you know,
societal systems, political systems, and the idea of, well,
how do these go right and how do these go wrong.
So I really wanted to jam those two things together
and see what happens.
And it became a place
where I felt like I could really play
and find a lot of moral and ethical difficulties
but also explore a lot of questions
that I was having about the world at the time
when I started writing it.
And so it just kind of grew from there,
larger than what I read as a kid
and larger conceptually than anything I've written before,
which is kind of scary but also a real joy to lean into.
-I'm so glad that you talked --
that you mentioned "The Dispossessed."
People, when they talk about the adult Le Guin, they -- fiction,
they always talk about "The Left Hand of Darkness."
But I always found "the Dispossessed" spoke to me
much more because it was a utopian society.
Yeah. Oh, that makes me want to go home and re-read it.
Well, I haven't re-read it in years.
-It's delightful in the sense
that it gets at what we're picking at, today.
How do we build something where we can --
where we take care of each other,
and have a thriving society, and is there a right answer to that?
And it just falls into all of the pitfalls
that humans always have and it just felt, you know,
really I don't want to say prescient
because it's very this is history, you know.
This is every time we try to build a new form of government,
every time we start a new society,
but she has it down so clearly,
it just felt like it gave me permission to try it myself
and see what I could do.
Especially at a time where people are saying,
"We're are at late-stage capitalism
and we should eat the rich."
Okay, well, let's take that out of the equation.
Let's take the money out and see what we can do from there
and do we still get to that place?
So it became a real door opener for me.
-Unh-huh.
In "The Dispossessed,"
she somehow made anarchy a viable political system,
which I thought was just an amazing accomplishment.
-It was just visionary and really bold.
And I thought, you know,
this is what I like when sci-fi is working on all cylinders.
That's what I love about it.
It's just a real -- it's a playground of human ideas,
and what does and doesn't work, and the very best of us,
hopefully, you know.
So I think Le Guin was really that for me and,
yeah, it just became a canvas to play with.
-Yeah.
Your -- in "We Lived on the Horizon,"
centers on a city called Bulwark.
Talk about Bulwark. I'll --
-Bulwark is a walled and wired city, as I want to explain it.
When I was first looking for a place to set this city,
I was thinking some sort of badlands area of the US,
just a jumping off point.
It is an outpost for and sort of people
who believe that they're the last people living in humanity
after societal collapse, war, and natural disaster.
So it is literally a bulwark against the rest of the world.
And it becomes this system that values labor
and what contributes to keeping people alive
and society going that way.
So all the work that goes into somebody getting an education
is valued in what you would call life hours and things like that.
This was my answer for what is an economy.
Because people get very upset when you don't have an economy.
And I said,
well, this is a different economy
and we're going to try this sort of idea of utopia
and see where the cracks happen.
And in this walled and wired city,
it monitors literally everything
that a person does throughout their day.
I found that people find this very upsetting
and folks don't necessarily realize
that we're already doing that.
And the leap that I've made with this city
that's monitoring literally everything
is just about two technological leaps away.
So it's far future but not so far future.
Everyone with a smart home
might be a little bit uncomfortable
after reading this.
-Yeah, definitely.
And one of the other aspects of Bulwark and this whole notion
of giving hours for the greater good, right?
That's how you would -- is that there's a group of people
who are body martyrs.
And they are people who give up parts of their bodies,
a leg, an eye, parts of their bodies
so other people can live more fruitful lives.
That was painful to read.
-It comes from a really good place,
if this makes any sense.
-Oh, no, no.
I mean it was painful to read because you did it so well.
-Oh, thank you.
-Yes. -It does.
It comes from a really good place that's really --
that's inherent in humanity.
So that idea of the body martyr
came about I was listening to a story on NPR.
They've run series on this a couple of times
about people who do blind organ donations.
Like they know someone out there needs a kidney.
They don't know who.
They sign up to go and donate an organ
because this is a good thing that they can do.
And this is known as a form of extreme altruism.
But this exists in every time we form a society,
there is someone out there who is thinking of the other
before they're thinking of themselves
and it feels like a calling.
And that's what ultimately keeps societies going.
And unfortunately,
governments have a real tendency to exploit this.
We see it now a lot with mutual aid.
Like when you look at things like the fires in California
and people wanting to put,
oh, there has to be conditions on
whether or not we're going to give you aid.
They can say that because they're assuming
and they know that altruists, and mutual aid,
and different NGOs,
and people really wanting to give will fill in those gaps.
So you see that way that that gets exploited by governments
just monetarily, effort-wise.
It felt like I wanted to take that to its most extreme
and say, okay,
well, this is what happens with extreme altruists.
And when something is rare and something is hard to get,
it becomes incredibly valued and that's
when exploitation happens.
-I know -- having written a novel,
I know writing is hard work.
Was this a particularly difficult book
for you to write or was it worked out in your mind
ahead of time, very much worked out in your mind?
-Well, I'm not a plotter,
so nothing is ever fully worked out in my mind.
I think this one was difficult because it has a unique voice
that I'd never written in before.
Nix being an AI, thinks differently.
Their brain is arranged differently.
They're used to being what I call a plural consciousness.
So they are a we and a they in the sense
that they are more than one.
And trying to find that voice and have it be both approachable
and relatable but distinctly inhuman
was a real hard trick for me to figure out.
And that took a lot of time.
I think I went through probably three drafts
just to try to get what that voice was.
And finding story is never linear for me.
When I think of a book,
it's just a giant knotted ball of yarn that has a color,
and across the way,
I will unravel it and find out what it is that works there.
So it's not the most efficient process.
I would say from first thought,
I'm usually thinking for almost five years
before I sit down and then I'm writing for around five years.
-Wow, wow.
-So something has to live in the back of my mind
collecting things sort of like a magpie and then a book comes.
-Do you keep notes when you're thinking about
in the back of your mind?
Do you take those things out and put them down?
-Yeah. I have a lot of notebooks.
I work in a lot of different ways.
I have a particular brand of notebook that I like.
They're Apicas, and they're small, cheap, whatever,
so that it doesn't feel precious to writing.
Because I've learned that if something feels too nice,
too important, I won't use it because this is just junk,
so I can't put it down in this nice thing.
So I have to have --
-No, Erika. No, Erika. -Right?
I have to have these little notebooks
that I don't mind about, and I'll also work on the computer,
and there are scraps and fragments all over the place,
half a scene here or half a scene there.
And then it just I will eventually compile it all
into a document that I start sliding around
and then I start churning through drafts.
And that takes, you know, that's the brunt of the work.
But, yeah, so I have notes all over the place.
I know some people like to keep notes in their phones,
but that's never been something I could possibly do.
That just feel like it's a technology
that doesn't need that part of my brain.
-Unh-huh.
When you got to a certain point, well,
where did the main woman character come from?
-Oh, I am really fortunate in
so I spend a lot of time around older women
and they've just been incredible forces in my life.
So I want to say that they're all just --
Enita is a combination of my mother, her friends,
myself, and a bunch of elders I met, you know,
doing theater growing up.
So just that whole kind of mash of everybody
and the way that you can be so determined in your sense of self
as you get older.
This is who I am and it's not changing,
but also realizing that, you know, there is more out there
and perhaps you could have done things differently.
So that kind of introspection and self-assuredness
at the same time was something I really wanted to lean into.
-Yeah, I think you just captured that perfectly
and with two sainted women.
And the sainted, like the body martyrs,
but the sainted are the leading citizens in Bulwark
whose lives were, you know,
pretty much I think destined from the fact
that their ancestors created it, right?
-Mm-hmm. Yes. -And so the comparison.
I mean, you have the body martyrs,
and you have the sainted, and you have Nix,
the sentient AI who looks human.
I loved it. -Yeah. Oh, thank you.
I really wanted to play with a stratified system like
a class system because that's what we're in, at the moment.
And the way class systems are only able to sustain themselves
if you don't see the other classes at all.
And this is what we're encountering now with, you know,
as far as consumer technology, consumerism, in general.
We don't see anybody on the other side
and it just creates not just a gap in wealth
and a gap in lifestyle.
It creates a gap in empathy and understanding.
And it's not necessarily intentional.
When people are born into a certain, you know, class,
that's just this is what you know.
How would you know otherwise?
So I wanted to find, you know,
the shades of gray in between that
and what happens when those divides start
to get a little porous and people start to mingle.
And if we can all become better
once those barriers are taken away.
So that's sort of how this class system came about.
-And, you know, we should make clear that the structure,
that this is a fast-moving novel.
You know, a lot happens in this novel
and it's so thought provoking and so -- I mean,
when I was reading it,
I kept thinking how did she come up with this,
you know, this notion.
You're right. It is very Le Guinian, isn't it?
It's lovely in that sense.
I think she would be thrilled to have this book,
you know, because, yeah.
So, Erika, are you already start --
you're on a book tour right now as we're doing this, right?
-I am. I'm currently in Providence, Rhode Island.
I was just at the amazing Riffraff Books last night.
They're the best.
So, yes, I am currently working on something else,
but as, you know, as you're doing the various things
you need to do to get a book out in the world,
that kind of takes a little bit of a back seat.
But, yeah, I'm working on another
I want to call it a world just next to ours
because that's how I let myself play.
And it is about a dying diplomat and her aging daughters.
So it's she considers herself to be the heart of the world
and so things go from there.
-Wow, yeah.
Do you read China Miéville's books?
-I do.
I want to say the last one I've read was
"Perdido Street Station" just for the massive world of it
and the real,
you know, interesting cultures clashing
and that fantasy element of it.
So, yeah, I thought that -- -Yeah, I think that he --
-Yeah.
-Yeah, go ahead. I interrupted you.
-Oh, no. That complex kind of society
and political machinations are real interesting to me, so.
-Right.
Yes, and so maybe
"We Lived on the Horizon" could be in dialog with all those,
you know, literary political novels, as well.
-I hope so. -Yes, yes.
Don't you think it definitely should be?
-I think it's hard, too,
because since it is a novel that moves.
It's also when I was writing it,
I knew it was also very introspective,
and so sometimes I think those things can clash.
But I feel like, in this case,
my goal was to make the introspection part
of the movement forward,
so I'm hopeful that it reads as that as much as it reads as,
oof, gosh, this is a little bit of a political thriller.
-And I think, honestly,
I think you've succeeded on all levels
and I'm so grateful to you for being on the show
and taking time on this -- on your book tour.
And I look forward to the next book.
Thank you. -Oh, thank you so much.
Thank you. -Thank you.
-This has been an absolute pleasure.
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