According to a recent You.gov poll, nearly half of Americans believe that aliens have visited the Earth. So many science fiction literature and movies have speculated about alien invasions and encounters. A new book, Hole In The Sky, by New York Times best-selling Daniel H. Wilson, re-envisions a first-contact invasion from an Indigenous perspective. 

Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and Portland author of several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Robopocalypse, as well as many nonfiction books, and countless short stories and graphic novels. He is a renowned roboticist and engineer with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon who has worked in recent years as a threat forecaster for NASA and the U.S. Air Force (Blue Horizons).

His newest book, HOLE IN THE SKY, was recently chosen by Scientific American magazine as a best pick for 2025. It’s just been picked by Netflix to become a film produced by Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films with Wilson adapting the screenplay. Wilson’s fellow Oklahoman and friend, Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs), is set to direct. Read more about the adaptation process in Space.com.

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In this podcast you’ll hear Wilson talking about his book, his early love of science fiction and the authors who inspired him and…

Why he set his book in the Spiro Mounds of Northeastern Oklahoma: “The mound builder civilization just has always been fascinating to me because it’s so ancient. It’s a precursor civilization before a lot of the tribes that we know today, including the Cherokee, and of course the Cherokee aren’t from that area. It’s just this ancient, mysterious place … basically our equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids in North America.”

How science and the military differ regarding aliens in his book:  ”I used to be a scientist and a scientist wants to understand that kind of stuff, even if it’s maybe you shouldn’t. I did some consulting, some contract work for the military. I’ve seen their perspective on it, which is, and particularly the Air Force, which is, you know, let’s destroy it. They see the unknown as a threat. A scientist wants to figure out the unknown.”

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The relationship of science and art: “The more I live, the more I think everything is really, just, we’re all just sort of these patterns that are existing and reality. I think that that’s what art is. It’s just capturing a beautiful pattern and  science is really about finding those patterns and understanding them.”

Synopsis: Hole In The Sky follows a newly sober Native father on a quest to repair his fractured relationship with his daughter, a foul-mouthed astrophysicist whose AR glasses begin to send her mysterious messages; and a by-the-books government agent as they brace for the arrival of a non-human intelligence that threatens our understanding of reality. Unlike a typical alien invasion story (which tends to mirror what generations of colonizers have done to Indigenous people), Hole In The Sky draws on Native mythologies and cosmologies about what lies beyond our world, embracing the unknown rather than seeking to control or destroy it.

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Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, The Clockwork Dynasty, and The Andromeda Evolution (an authorized sequel to The Andromeda Strain). He earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as master’s degrees in machine learning and robotics. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.