Alien invasion stories are among the earliest science fiction in the Western canon—they not only explore the strange and unknown but also heighten the stakes by bringing danger inside human civilization. Daniel H. Wilson’s newest techno-thriller Hole in the Sky, which was voted one of Scientific American’s best fiction books of 2025, examines the tropes of alien invasion through a new lens: What if the extraterrestrials landed not on the White House lawn or in a farmer’s back fields but instead in part of the Cherokee Nation’s reservation in Oklahoma? Wilson explores how a modern military, as well as Native and non-Native civilians, might react to such a twist on a familiar tale.
Scientific American spoke with Wilson about Native science that was once indistinguishable from magic, the real scientific knowledge that inspires his fiction writing and the projects that he’s working on next.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
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Why did you choose to set this first-contact story in the Cherokee Nation ?
I write what I know. I know a lot about robotics. I was a scientist, and I have done some threat forecasting for the U.S. government. So I’ve intersected with some military types. And then I grew up in the Cherokee Nation, so that’s the people that I know. I found that these three different facets of my life all have different postures toward the unknown, right? Soldiers want to destroy it; scientists want to understand it. And I think that there’s a fair amount of truth to say that it is a Native perspective to be more comfortable with the unknown. That said, I like to subvert expectations.
If you look at existing alien-first-contact stories, it’s typically an alien invasion, and the aliens show up and want to extract our resources, and they want to enslave us. Sometimes they destroy our culture, like in Independence Day. Sometimes they literally take over our bodies like the pod people [from] Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And I think these are all really thinly veiled fear projections that the aliens are going to show up and do to us what colonizers have done to Indigenous people for a long time. And I think first contact by itself is a pretty loaded term if you’re talking to Native people. So I thought there was a really cool intersection there and a really cool opportunity to look at alien invasion from a different perspective.
Can you tell me about your own firsthand look at the military perspective?
I did some work as a threat forecaster for the U.S. Air Force’s … Blue Horizons Program, where they take [you], a science-fiction author, and pair you with an analyst who has secret clearance and who briefs you on technologies that the Air Force is concerned about. And then you write a science-fiction threat scenario that’s ideally really fun to read and very accurate in terms of military and technological details that allows Air Force people to get a better gage of what the threat could be rather than just reading a technical paper. So as a result of that, I went to the Aspen Security [Forum] and interacted with a four-star general who oversaw USNORTHCOM [U.S. Northern Command] and NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] at the time. I listened to this guy talk about unidentified anomalous phenomena. Regardless of how likely it is, it’s definitely something that people are talking about in a serious way now. So I was just thinking: What does it mean? I think it means different things to different people based on their posture toward the unknown.
You’ve mentioned that you have a science degree. What exactly is your degree in?
I started out wanting to write science fiction as a kid, and I wrote a bunch of science fiction that didn’t go anywhere. So, as a consolation prize, I studied science. I did a computer science degree at the University of Tulsa, which was a bicycle ride from my house growing up in North Tulsa. I was able to get into Carnegie Mellon University’s Ph.D. program in robotics, and I did a Ph.D. in robotics [there]. Then I did master’s degrees in artificial intelligence and robotics. I discovered that suddenly people were interested in my science fiction now because I had this degree. And so I just took a hard left turn right back into science fiction. I love thinking about this stuff, whether I’m building real robots or whether I’m in my pajamas, writing science fiction.
Is there anything about our real scientific understanding of space or potential alien life that you hope readers get from the book?
With this novel, I wanted to lean into the science of technology that I love. The novel was initially called Heliopause. The heliopause is the boundary of our solar system, where the solar wind fades out. If you think of our sun as a campfire, this is at the edge of the light, where it gets really dark. That’s where the Voyager spacecraft are at right now. They’ve kind of crossed through this liminal space, and they are legitimately in the interstellar medium, where we’ve never set foot, as far as I know, as humans.
I haven’t done it, personally!
Me personally, I’m a homebody [laughs].
That said, I love that that’s where we are as a species. And I love the idea that we’d wake something up out there, you know?
I [also] really wanted to introduce readers to the idea of Indigenous technology. When settlers arrived to the East Coast, they encountered forests that they compared to the Garden of Eden a lot. It was an amazing place to be. It was perfect for people. And they noticed there were all these “primitives” who were living there who didn’t know what they had; the noble savage stereotype kind of came out of this. Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and what those settlers were looking at was not magic. It was technology. It was advanced agroforestry techniques that have been in place for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. It was very intentional.
Why, from a Western perspective, can’t we see Indigenous technology? I think that it’s because there’s a fundamentally different goal for these technologies. One thing is that if you look at Indigenous technology, it’s often very specific to a place and a time. All those agroforestry techniques that are so amazing and so advanced don’t work anywhere except for right there—they might not even work outside of that particular forest. Western science doesn’t like that. We like principles that can be applied anywhere.
I wanted to make my [alien] entity, the thing they’re interacting with, hyperspecific to place, embodied in the environment, interacting with the environment and also interacting with [the characters] through levers that are foreign to our understanding of how to use Western tools.
You follow very different perspectives within the text, and then in the ending, they’re all attempting to look at the same thing. How did you decide when to use the book’s different voices and how the aliens would be understood by them?
It was important for me that this isn’t about how the Native point of view wins or anything like that. And honestly, there really is no such thing as a Native point of view. I really wanted to make sure that all three of these characters needed to have kind of a mash-up to make it through this together, because these are all three facets of my own personality, and I value all three of them. Part of it was about getting the right voice. So Jim and Tawny are the heart of the story, and the single wide that [Jim is] in is a dead description of my grandfather’s single wide in Wagner, Okla. Mikayla was just straight science academia interacting with people from all over the world who managed to find a common vernacular to do their science and cooperate with each other. That’s what science is all about—cooperation. Then I had the sort of conventional, square-jaw Hero Guy; what was funny was his voice needed to be a little boring.
The scientist character Mikayla hears what she thinks is an artificial intelligence speaking to her through a headset, but it turns out to be an alien entity. Why did you decide she would experience first contact in this way?
A lot of times, I’ll start thinking thematically, and then all the details just magically fall into place. And so, with Mikayla, she’s a person who loves science, and she loves technology, and she loves science for those good old Western values. She wants to take that science and exploit it and make something that’s useful. She wears these augmented reality glasses that make up for unnamed deficits in her ability to recognize faces and expressions and stuff like that. She is not diagnosed with anything. That’s just her experience of reality; I hate putting labels on that kind of stuff. What’s going on with Mikayla as she moves through the novel is that she’s so intensely interested in understanding what this entity is that she’s actually slowly dissociating from humanity entirely.
Mikayla is really young; she’s Black. When she’s at NASA, she’s a NASA astrophysicist with a big brain. Then, when she leaves NASA, and she’s in her own community, she’s a nerd, and she’s not finding any support there. The inspiration for her character is somebody who can’t really find her people. And so, instead, she finds it through this pursuit of knowledge and through her tools. And when the tool starts speaking to her, and it takes her down a path, that, I think, is sort of the logical conclusion for her.
I don’t want to put you on the spot, but what are you working on next?
Right now I am adapting the movie version of Hole in the Sky for Netflix, and I have Sterlin Harjo attached to direct. He’s a buddy of mine from Oklahoma, and he just did Reservation Dogs. I’m also developing a television show with Amblin. I’m doing television work for AGBO, which is the Joe and Anthony Russo production company. I’ve been doing some thinking about the world as a simulation and what that might mean—and then, also, some thinking around this notion of how we carry our ancestors’ voices inside of us. And [the concept of] AI versions of ourselves and how we’re going to interact with them in the future is just a really fascinating sort of intersection of technology and tradition.
What books inspired you while writing this story or would you recommend to our readers?
This book was heavily influenced by Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It’s a classic. I read a lot of Native stuff, like oral traditions and stuff like that. I just read Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which is a Native vampire story. The guy is a genius. It’s an awesome horror story. [Grabs some books from a nearby pile.] This is another really fascinating book that’s just out of left field that science people might like: this is called Anaximander, [about a philosopher] credited as the person who invented Western science in the first place. Before we had Western science, it was all mixed up with religion and everything—it was a lot more magical. I’ve just been thinking about all these different ways of approaching science.
