Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon is an evocative character-driven dystopian novel.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Brilliant dystopian novel…Swyler’s elegant, polyphonic narrative juggles many themes, foremost among them human-robot convergence, through ever-shifting perspectives…This is a powerhouse.”
In her own words, here is Erika Swyler‘s Book Notes music playlist for her novel We Lived on the Horizon:
When imagining the music of future worlds, it’s too easy to focus on electronica and technological leaps. Writers fall into a similar trap when imagining future societies: more tech, less soul, so to speak. My most recent novel, We Lived on the Horizon, imagines a far-future post-cataclysm world that’s simultaneously high tech and low tech, and a walled city that’s about to tip into revolution. For every technocrat there’s a luddite, and both question what’s beneficial for human life. The music I listened to while writing the book was split between things that lean toward the humanity of the individual, and things that lean towards grand scale otherness. I’m an obsessive person, and when writing I’ll loop a piece of music until it becomes a meditation, and ultimately a doorway to character and scene. Two of We Lived On the Horizon’s characters are singers, which put me on the hunt for music with vocalists who captured their textures. Bulwark, the city at the novel’s center, is vast, which made film scores essential for imagining scale and scope. In that sense, I’ve chosen music that has the feel of each character, and the world itself. Old and new, human and inhuman. Ultimately, I find that mix hopeful and beautiful. This collection is a window into We Lived on the Horizon.
Parallax as a character sets the tone for the world the way a film score might. As an enormous omniscient AI that runs the city of Bulwark, Parallax is difficult to think of as having a voice, but there’s a beautiful pulsing tension to this piece that sounds like what I imagine digital pings might feel like. When writing a character that’s also an enormous set piece, it’s a challenge to communicate both scale and intimacy; this piece touches on both. It’s vast, yet delicate, and builds to an incredible unease.
“The Other Woman,” Nina Simone
Enita Malovis, one of the central protagonists, is an older bioprosthetic surgeon who is unknowingly obsessed with leaving and being left. She’s someone suddenly confronted by her solitude, age, and fears. A key part in finding Enita’s character was balancing self-assuredness with self-doubt, particularly in her relationship with Helen. This song lives in that place. When searching for a sound that’s deeply human and regal, speaks of our flaws, and feels like the best a body can do, there’s no way you don’t wind up at Nina Simone.
Helen Vinter as a character is awed by history and awed by Enita. “Shark Smile” is this bouncing song of longing, lust, and sharp edges. To me it captures what it is to be knocked over by someone in the way Helen is by Enita. This might be my most played song while drafting, because story breeds story. From it grew a real sense of Helen’s rhythm when speaking, her manner of storytelling, and what her obsessions feel like.
Nix, as an AI and plural consciousness, was a tricky character to find. I spent years circling their voice. They needed to be utterly other, yet still have a sense and feel that resonated with the human. For someone my age, that balance was the shock of OK Computer in 1997. It was a leap for Radiohead, and turned my ear and mind to technology’s impact on the world and art. “No Surprises” is almost a lullaby, but it has real creeping dread. That’s both aspects of Nix, their artificiality, and their attempts at humanity. The result—something that borders on uncanny, both loving and fear-inducing.
Neren is one of the novel’s two singers. When searching for her sound, I went on an absolute binge of contraltos. It’s an underrepresented vocal range, though I maintain if you want to break someone’s heart, you want a contralto voice. “Night Shift” is a song in two parts, and in that sense mirrors Neren’s life in the novel, which has a distinct before and after and centers on navigating the ways we behave when something’s gone wrong. Dacus’s voice sounds like petrichor smells. It’s a voice that would draw humans and artificial humans alike.
For Joni, the book’s other singer, my ear wanted a voice that was both flashy and yearning, and distinct from Neren’s in range and weight. I must have looped this song for days. LP’s voice is longing, with the feeling of someone running on pure emotion, the kind of gut-wrenching desire that makes a person do terrible things. The song is upbeat and surefooted, and I think that conviction is Joni, especially when she’s wrong. LP’s range also lives in that higher end, a place where other singers tend to whisper. LP belts it, whole body. That’s how I imagine Joni.
When thinking about who Tomas is—a sibling, a musician, a coder, and an angry young man—I focused on the overwhelming impulse to do something that’s so present in the song. “Uprising” incorporates all the anger, frustration, and desire for change that’s violently alive at Tomas’s age. It’s so literal as to be almost over-the-top. It also feels like music that would be written by someone who first studied coding and computer systems only to find them not enough.
A really cinematic piece that leans on both the large and the intimate. For me that encompasses Davet, a person who has never belonged to a binary and is split between states of being, between the machine world and the human world, single and plural. They’re deciding how much they do and don’t want to change. “How it Ends” rides that edge. The synth sound, the echoey sliding vocal, the strings—it’s playing with space in a way Davet is struggling to.
Sinjin is an older toymaker who hand-carves his work. When thinking of musicians who might have a secret whittling hobby, Jason Isbell was at the top of the list. Isbell’s voice has a wise quality, and a calmness even when fraught. That’s the essence of Sinjin and how he needed to function in the novel. This is a song I can imagine Sinjin humming as he carves a toy, thinking of who will eventually hold it.
When imagining artforms that might survive an apocalypse, singing and storytelling are at the top. For me that necessitated an opera house. Opera often highlights class divides around appreciation and accessibility, both of which are driving points for the novel. As it relates to the larger world of the novel, I thought about pieces with voices that can’t exist without each other, pieces that capture plurality musically, and the ways vocal ranges blend. This duet has always triggered frisson for me. To my mind, frisson is the closest thing a human body feels to connecting outside itself. It doesn’t hurt that Kiri Te Kanawa and Katherine Jenkins are voices for the ages.
“Rain,” Hans Zimmer, Benjamin Wallfisch
I chose this piece for The Stacks, a conscious library. They were one of the more fun characters to write, but also one of the trickiest. They’re part of a larger AI, and function as a friend and comfort to another AI. To me, this piece is a little ping of acknowledgement from the Stacks to Nix. If I’m being honest, I could make an entire list that’s nothing but pieces from Hans Zimmer scores. It would birth a generation of new speculative fiction. To my ear this has the feeling of an approachable vastness. It’s someone older and wiser trying to gently impart wisdom.
I can’t write any future without listening to M83. This is for the world outside the walled city, the future itself. At my age, solidly in life’s middle, any vision of the future is rife with the weirdness of retrofuture. That’s the influence of all the writing and cinema I grew up on. M83’s synths and sweeping sound fits that vision, and “Deceiver” speaks to the place where the world of We Lived on the Horizon leaves off. It’s a world I want to play in, a swirling mix of humanity, life, and tech, with a great big beating heart.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Erika Swyler’s playlist for her novel Light from Other Stars
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.