Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.
In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends those stories with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs, to deliver a fresh take on the classic tale of first contact with an alien civilization.
Wilson says the typical alien-invasion tale tends to parallel the real-life story of European settlement in the Americas.
“I love robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, you realize that in an alien invasion, the aliens show up, and they usually want to extract our resources, take our land, our water, destroy our culture, enslave us,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s kind of a really thinly veiled fear projection that what colonizers have done to Indigenous people will be done to our society. And so I started from there.”
Wilson also managed to weave in other elements of Cherokee mythology, such as a supernatural being known as Tsul ‘Kalu or Judaculla. In tribal lore, the Judaculla is a giant with slanted eyes — something like the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch. The Judaculla plays a brief but pivotal role in “Hole in the Sky.”
“If you think about the human embodiment of Indigenous technology, it would be the Judaculla,” Wilson says, “because among the Cherokee at that time, the most advanced technological problems would have been keeping the ecosystem in balance to support all the people in perpetuity, without overexploiting it and doing what we’ve been doing for the last 200 years or more in North America.”
In Wilson’s novel, there’s a good deal of Cherokee-style magic at work, centered on Spiro Mounds, a complex of earthworks that was built centuries ago in eastern Oklahoma. But there are also lots of references to the U.S. military’s renewed interest in UFOs/UAPs. That part of the story draws upon a different phase in Wilson’s life.
“I had been writing threat assessments for the Air Force, which is where they find science-fiction authors, and they pair you with an analyst,” he says. “They brief you on some kind of potentially dangerous tech or interesting technology. And then you write a story, something fun that’s fictional, that demonstrates these sorts of threat capabilities. Then, higher-up people read these fictional accounts in order to get a better idea of what the threat could be.”
Wilson was amazed to learn that military officials have serious concerns about unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nobody’s saying they’re aliens, but we don’t know what they are, and we’re intensely interested in learning more because it is a major defense issue for our country,” he says. “Walking away from that, I was thinking, ‘My God … This sounds crazy, but we could be in a situation in our lifetimes where first contact will be a real thing.'”
What would we do if the aliens arrived? Wilson imagines the actions that might be taken by intelligence experts, military leaders, scientists and regular folks — including a Cherokee oilfield worker and his daughter — and weaves them into a deliciously tangled tale.
“Hole in the Sky” is the latest science-fiction novel by Daniel H. Wilson. (Cover Design by Oliver Munday; Photo © Brenton Salo / Published by Doubleday Penguin Random House)
A couple of the plot twists in “Hole in the Sky” capitalize on far-out aspects of space science, such as the real-world odysseys of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft beyond our solar system’s heliopause — that is, beyond the boundary where the outward-flowing solar wind is stopped by the faint pressure of the surrounding interstellar medium.
“If you think of our sun as a fire in the infinite night, this is where the light of the fire dies out, and you get out there into the real nitty-gritty between stars,” Wilson says. “And I thought, what better place to wake up something in the night than whenever you set foot outside the light of our own fire.”
Wilson drew upon recent observations of interstellar objects to describe how the aliens make their arrival. “We’ve gained this capability to observe interstellar objects, and they just keep getting more interesting, and frankly, more scary and creepy,” he says.
Turning real-life science into science fiction is nothing new for Wilson. Before he became a novelist, he was a robotics researcher with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. That expertise came in handy when he sat down to write books like “How to Survive a Robot Uprising,” “How to Build a Robot Army,” “Robopocalypse” and “Robogenesis.”
“This is what I do with my writing,” he says. “I mean, I was a scientist.”
A film adaptation of “Robopocalypse” has been in the works for 15 years. “I still hold out hope that we’ll see a ‘Robopocalypse’ movie someday, but I’m not holding my breath,” Wilson says.
In contrast, there’s a chance that “Hole in the Sky” will be coming to a screen near you. Wilson says he’s adapting the story for Netflix.
“We have Sterlin Harjo attached to direct,” he says. “If you haven’t seen ‘The Lowdown,’ which is a TV show he just made with Ethan Hawke, you gotta watch it, it’s incredible. He of course did ‘Reservation Dogs’ before that. Sterlin is an incredible Native director and writer, and working with him on that has been really fun.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
As a roboticist and a novelist, Wilson has some definite ideas about how intelligent machines should be portrayed in science fiction.
“I love the idea of robots as an alien entity, as a bizarre, foreign, new, novel approach to reach human-level intelligence,” he says. “Instead, what we’ve got with AI … we’ve just got this funhouse mirror of ourselves, right? Which, frankly, is kind of disappointing to me.”
Wilson says he prefers fictional robots that are not all too human.
“I like robots that say, ‘I’m a robot. This is what I do. Get lost.’ Maybe they don’t even care about humans, right?” he says. “Annalee Newitz has a new one out, called ‘Automatic Noodle,’ that has robots with this perspective, which I appreciate.”
When it comes to far-out fiction that reflects a Native American perspective, Wilson has a couple of suggestions.
“There’s this short-story collection called ‘Never Whistle at Night,’ which is pretty awesome. A lot of crazy stories in there,” he says. “And then, Stephen Graham Jones, he never disappoints, man. … I just read ‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.’ Kind of a crazy title, but it’s a good book. It’s a Native sort of vampire story, and it’s pretty solid.”
“Automatic Noodle” and “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” were published this year, which makes them a little too new for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. But “Never Whistle at Night,” a horror anthology featuring works by Indigenous writers, came out two years ago. For that reason, we’ll designate “Never Whistle at Night” as the official selection for the CLUB Club, which highlights books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or secondhand book shop.
The timing of the pick is perfect: The Halloween season is the best time of year to sink your teeth into a juicy collection of horror stories.
Daniel H. Wilson is in the midst of a nationwide book tour that includes stops in Seattle and in several Oregon cities. I’ll be the moderator for the Oct. 16 event at the Seattle Public Library, featuring a conversation between Wilson and Seattle science-fiction author Nisi Shawl. The event is being presented by the library in partnership with Clarion West and Third Place Books. It’s free to attend in person, or to watch via streaming video, but registration is required.
My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit DominicaPhetteplace.com.
Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot’s 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Use the form at the bottom of this post to subscribe to Cosmic Log, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.
