A scientist creates an android to assist her with organ transplants in Erika Swyler’s dystopian We Lived on the Horizon (Atria, Jan.).
We Lived on the Horizon covers vast thematic territory: AI, capitalism, medicine, motherhood. Did you intend to take on so much?
It expanded by necessity as I was writing. I started from a place of thinking about altruism and extreme altruists. This came about from an NPR piece on blind kidney donation and the way that altruists are an essential part of society. I got really fascinated with the idea that they’re a large part of why we survive, yet governments exploit altruists. At the same time, generative AI was starting to take off, and I started to think: Would machines view altruism differently than humans? From there, this strange beast started to really grow.
What drew you to creating a protagonist in her 70s?
There aren’t a ton of narratives about older women. In fiction, we often aim for a younger reader, which is odd to me because when you go out in the book world, the people who show up for events are generally older. I’ve also spent a lot of time around older people and find them incredibly wonderful and fascinating. I really wanted to play in that area of knowing you’re closer to the end than you are to the beginning and all that entails.
How did you approach writing from the perspective of an AI?
Nix’s voice took me a very long time to find, especially because I knew it had to change over the course of the novel. Our personalities are so deeply informed by our bodies, and when we think about machine consciousness, we still approach it from the idea of a person in a body rather than how machines actually operate. Having a body is a trauma. Everything that we experience negatively in life is experienced through the body. So the question was how to root a consciousness that’s never experienced real sensation into something that’s just a continual feedback they don’t know how to process?
Do you feel like you’re predicting the future?
The boundary between what is human and what is machine has already blurred. I’m someone with a bit of metal in my body—I have screws and plates and all that. And when it comes to consciousness, computer coding is a language. What happens when you switch languages? When you achieve fluency in a new language, it really does rewire your brain.
But as far as the far future, oh, goodness. I hope we’re not headed to what I was thinking about. In science fiction we look for the hopeful and we look for the cautionary. To manage machine madness, we need people with deeply human perspectives involved in the tech world. So I wanted to show examples on all different levels of society and class interacting with technology.
