Fall 2025 Worldbuilding Distinguished Lecture with Erika Swyler

Arizona State University welcomes the nationally bestselling author of The Book of Speculation Erika Swyler as a guest in its Fall 2025 Distinguished Worldbuilding Initiative Lecture series. Swyler will discuss her novel, We Lived on the Horizon in an hybrid event on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025 at 1:30 p.m. Arizona / MST (1:30 p.m. PDT / 2:30 p.m. MDT / 3:30 p.m. CDT / 4:30 p.m. EDT). 

The conversation will be facilitated by ASU fiction writer Matt Bell, a professor in the Department of English and director of the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative.

The event is free of charge and open to the public; please register to attend.

About the book

The acclaimed author of the “dazzling” (Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Book of Speculation returns with an engrossing new novel about a bio-prosthetic surgeon and her personal AI as they are drawn into a revolution.

The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind’s last stronghold, called the Sainted.

Saint Enita Malovis, long accustomed to luxury, feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s hidden underclass and the programs that impose and maintain order.

A complex, imaginative, and unforgettable novel, We Lived on the Horizon grapples with concepts as varied as the human desire for utopia, body horror, and what the future holds for humanity and machine alike.

About the author

Erika Swyler is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed novels We Lived On the Horizon, Light From Other Stars and The Book of Speculation. Her writing has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Literary Hub, VIDA, The New York Times, People, and elsewhere.

About the Worldbuilding Initiative

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative endeavors to identify and engage the realists of a larger reality at ASU: students, faculty, and staff invested in imagining stronger communities, more egalitarian societies, truly sustainable economies, more just ways of inhabiting a planet under duress, and other ways of making better futures together.

• For in-person attendees, light refreshments and drinks will be provided.
• For online attendees, the event will be livestreamed on ASU Live.

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events