WE LIVED ON THE HORIZON by Erika Swyler

5 stars

This exceptional, compelling dystopian novel makes you think deeply about the future of humanity, AI, and the potentially unpredictable interactive dynamics between the two.

Centuries ago, survivors of a climate collapse apocalypse built a high walled city in the desert named Bulwark. They installed an advanced AI named Parallax in charge to ensure the enclave’s survival and optimize its future. The founders set up Parallax to both grant and debit life points based on how much one’s family helps or takes resources away from the city. The families who sacrificed the most for Bulwark’s founding got huge points and the privileged wealthy status of “Sainted.”  They form the elite of Bulwark, passing on their titles mostly passing on their wealth inheritance to their families as opposed to gifting them to those in need.

The poor workers in contrast work often dangerous, minimum-points labor jobs and have little hope of raising their status beyond the survival level. They grow the crops, The only exceptions involve those risking their lives such as by working at the dangerous high levels of the wall where deaths often occur, or those offering up their body parts as heralded “Body Martyrs” for sick or aging Saints.

Saint Enita is known as Saint Stitch-Skin for her growing and surgically implanted replacement nanofilament body parts for injured workers. She does this both out of scientific interest and to save the exorbitant debt they would incur if treated as a hospital. She has converted her house AI, up until then has run all of her large house systems, into a lab and surgical assistant for her and named him Nix (though Nix who is comprised of many subsystems and thus thinks mostly in plural terms self describes as “they”). Enita goes one step further as she senses her own aging body failing her and decides to create a nanofilament body for Nix, which ends up resembling both Enita and her long-time, mostly estranged lover Helen.

As Nix becomes more and more integrated into an android body, Enita comes to think of Nix as her child, and Nix struggles between plurality and the singularity of being in a body as Nix gradually becomes cut off from the other house systems and city-wide network that sustained the AI.

The plot kicks into gear with the murder of a Sainted as well as two workers dropping off Neren, a body martyr, who’s sustained a life-threatening leg injury in an apartment building collapse. Enita replaces her leg before realizing that Neren is a body martyr, and the nanobots that the surgery introduces into her system, will prevent her from giving any more body part donations which is her one mission in life.

All this comes up against a revolt rising, and what Parallax, the City Stacks that form its AI library, and Helen as a historian sees as an inevitable result of wildly unjust wealth distribution (cue our current culture!) Through a series of unexpected events, Nix and Neren must team up to escape the revolt which is intent on destroying the Saints and any who are “different” which counts Nix as an android and Neren who got a metallic leg replacement.

As they go on the run to safety and as Nix comes into human, the story transcends into a complex and brilliant look at society, revolution, historical inevitability and renewal. WOW- an amazing read!!!!

Thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.