Swyler, Erika
Entry updated 24 February 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1975- ) US playwright and author whose Book of Speculation sequence beginning with The Book of Speculation (2015) which, in a manner evocative of James P Blaylock's exercises in Pacific-Rim Magic Realism, Equipoises a fantasy-based tale of doom attending an old house half-awash in the rising seas of Long Island (New York), with hints that Climate Change must be factored into the narrative as it grows. A librarian lives in the house, increasingly haunted by the knowledge that his mother, who worked as a carnival mermaid, drowned outside his front door: as did all her female ancestors, on the same day. Their deaths are a narrative of a secret America.
Swyler is of more direct sf interest for Light from Other Stars (2019), whose protagonist irradiates her experience of space exploration with memories of a Florida childhood where her obsessional desire to become an astronaut triggers her father's Invention of a form of Time Distortion to keep her young and recruitable. She has left behind her a planet devastated by Climate Change, with the hope that the expedition she has joined will find somewhere a livable world for humans. We Lived on the Horizon (2025) is set in a moderately distant Near Future Dystopian world some time after an unspecified planetary Disaster, with the action mostly confined to a highly defended City whose class-bound inhabitants are not well prepared for revolutionary AI-driven advances. The Ruined Earth outside the walls is due to be reoccupied by Androids designed to survive what Homo sapiens has done to the planet (see also Posthuman). [JC]
Erika Swyler
born New York: 1975
works
series
The Book of Speculation
- The Book of Speculation (London: Atlantic Books, 2015) [Book of Speculation: pb/]
- The Mermaid Girl (New York: St Martin's Press, 2016) [novella: chap: Book of Speculation: pb/]
individual titles
- Light from Other Stars (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2019) [hb/]
- We Lived on the Horizon (New York: Atria, 2025) [hb/Laywan Kwan]
links
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