Daniel H. Wilson on Finding a Native Take on Traditional Alien Invasion Stories

Alien invasion stories are among the earliest works of science fiction in the Western canon: not only do they explore the strange and unknown, but they also raise the stakes by introducing danger into human civilization. Daniel H. Wilson’s new techno thriller Hole in the sky, who was elected one of ScientificAmerican best fiction books of 2025, examines alien invasion tropes from a new perspective: What if aliens landed not on the White House lawn or in a farmer’s fields, but rather on part of the Cherokee Nation 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 story.

Scientific American spoke with Wilson about the indigenous science that was once indistinguishable from magic, the real scientific knowledge that inspires his fictional writing, and the projects he’ll work on next.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

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Why did you choose to set this story of first contact in the Cherokee Nation?

I write what I know. I know a lot about robotics. I was a scientist and I did threat forecasts for the US government. So I met certain types of soldiers. And then I grew up in the Cherokee Nation, so those are the people that I know. I discovered that these three different facets of my life all have different postures towards the unknown, right? The soldiers want to destroy it; scientists want to understand it. And I think there’s some truth in that it’s an indigenous perspective to be more comfortable with the unknown. That said, I like subverting expectations.

If you look at the existing stories of first contact with aliens, it’s usually about 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, as 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 thinly veiled fear projections that aliens are going to show up and do to us what colonizers did to indigenous people for a long time. And I think first contact in 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 the alien invasion from a different perspective.

Can you tell me about your own take on the military perspective?

I worked as a threat forecaster for the US Air Force’s Blue Horizons program, where they take [you]a science fiction author, and will put you in touch with a secretly cleared analyst who will brief you on technologies of concern to the Air Force. And then you write a science fiction threat scenario that is ideally a lot of fun to read and very specific in terms of military and technological details that allows people in the Air Force to get a better idea of ​​what the threat might be rather than just reading a technical document. Following this, I went to the Aspen security office. [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 abnormal phenomena. Regardless of the likelihood, it’s definitely something people are talking about seriously now. So I was just thinking: what does that mean? I think it means different things to different people depending on their attitude toward the unknown.

You mentioned that you had a science degree. What is your diploma exactly?

I started out wanting to write science fiction when I was a kid, and I wrote a bunch of science fiction that didn’t go anywhere. So, as a consolation prize, I studied science. I graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in computer science, just down the street from my home in North Tulsa, where I grew up. I was able to enter the doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. program in robotics, and I did a Ph.D. in robotics [there]. I then did a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and robotics. I found that suddenly people were interested in my science fiction because I had this degree. And so I just took a sharp left turn back to science fiction. I love thinking about this stuff, whether I’m building real robots or in my pajamas and writing science fiction.

Is there anything about our true scientific understanding of space or potential extraterrestrial life that you hope readers will take away from the book?

With this novel, I wanted to look at the science of technology that I love. The novel was originally called Heliopause. The heliopause is the edge of our solar system, where the solar wind disappears. If you think of our sun as a campfire, it’s at the edge of light, where it’s really dark. This is where the Voyager spacecraft is currently located. They’ve sort of crossed over into this liminal space, and they’re rightfully in the interstellar medium, which is where we’ve never set foot, to my knowledge, as humans.

I didn’t do it personally!

Personally, I’m a homebody [laughs].

That said, I like that this is where we are as a species. And I love the idea that we would awaken something there, you know?

I [also] I really wanted to introduce readers to the idea of ​​indigenous technology. When settlers arrived on the East Coast, they encountered forests that they often compared to the Garden of Eden. It was an incredible place. It was perfect for the people. And they noticed that there were all these “primitives” living there who didn’t know what they had; the stereotype of the noble savage was born from there. Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and what these colonists were observing was not magic. It was technology. These were advanced agroforestry techniques that had been in place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It was very intentional.

Why, from a Western perspective, can’t we see indigenous technology? I think this is because these technologies serve a fundamentally different purpose. One thing is, if you look at indigenous technology, it’s often very specific to a place and a time. All these amazing, advanced agroforestry techniques don’t work anywhere but there – they might not even work outside of this particular forest. Western science doesn’t like that. We like principles that can be applied anywhere.

I wanted to do my [alien] entity, the thing they interact with, hyperspecific to place, embodied in the environment, interacting with the environment and also interacting with [the characters] by levers foreign to our understanding of the use of Western tools.

You follow very different perspectives in the text, and then at the end they’re all trying to look at the same thing. How did you decide when to use the different voices in the book and how the aliens would be understood by them?

It was important to me that it wasn’t about how the indigenous point of view wins or anything like that. And honestly, the indigenous point of view doesn’t really exist. I really wanted to make sure that these three characters needed some sort of blend to get through this together, because they’re three sides of my own personality, and I like all three of them. Part of it was finding the right voice. Jim and Tawny are therefore the heart of the story, and the single that [Jim is] is a dead description of my grandfather’s single in Wagner, Okla. Mikayla was just a heterosexual academic scientist 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 science: cooperation. Then I had the sort of conventional square-jawed Hero Guy; what was funny was that his voice must have been a little annoying.

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 that she would experience first contact this way?

A lot of times I start thinking thematically, and then all the details 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 this science, harness it and create something useful. She wears these augmented reality glasses that compensate for anonymous deficits in her ability to recognize faces and expressions and stuff like that. He hasn’t been diagnosed with anything. It’s just his experience of reality; I hate putting labels on things like this. What happens with Mikayla as she progresses through the novel is that she is so intensely interested in understanding what this entity is that she slowly and completely disassociates herself from humanity.

Mikayla is really young; she is black. While at NASA, she is an astrophysicist with a big brain. Then when she leaves NASA and finds herself in her own community, she’s a nerd and she doesn’t find any support there. The inspiration for his character is someone who can’t quite find his people. And this is how she finds it through this quest for knowledge and thanks to her tools. And when the tool starts talking to her and it takes her on a path, I think that’s kind of the logical conclusion for her.

I don’t want to embarrass you, but what are you working on next?

Currently, I am adapting the film version of Hole in the sky for Netflix, and I have Sterling Harjo attached to direct. He’s a friend of mine from Oklahoma, and he just did it Reservation dogs. I’m also developing a TV show with Amblin. I work in television for AGBO, Joe and Anthony Russo’s production company. I thought about the world as a simulation and what that might mean, and then I also thought about this notion of how we carry the voices of our ancestors within 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 kind of intersection of technology and tradition.

What books inspired you when writing this story or would you recommend to our readers?

This book was strongly influenced by Roadside picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It’s a classic. I read a lot of indigenous things, like oral traditions and stuff like that. I just read this one by Stephen Graham Jones The buffalo hunter, which is a native vampire story. This guy is a genius. It’s a great horror story. [Grabs some books from a nearby pile.] This is another really fascinating book that comes out of left field and might appeal to scientists: it’s called Anaximander, [about a philosopher] recognized as the person who invented Western science in the first place. Before Western science, it was all mixed with religion and everything else – it was much more magical. I’ve just been thinking about all these different ways of approaching science.