PORTLAND, Ore. – Where Indigenous knowledge meets science fiction, Cherokee Nation citizen and author Daniel H. Wilson released another mind-bending novel – “Hole in the Sky” – on Oct. 7.
Wilson writes on the Indigenous perspective of first contact with an alien entity, set in Spiro, Oklahoma, which is home to the Spiro Mounds, the only prehistoric Native American archaeological site in Oklahoma open to the public.
“If you think of most alien invasion movies, the aliens show up and they do to us what colonizers have done to Indigenous people forever. They extract our resources. They try to destroy our culture. They blow up our monuments. They steal our bodies, all that stuff,” Wilson said. “I was kind of thinking like what would be the Native perspective on that, and what would that be like if it happened in the Cherokee Nation.”
From three different perspectives, Wilson takes readers on a journey of dealing with the unknown.
The first character is an American threat forecaster only known as the “Man Downstairs” who analyzes a single data pattern of predictions that comes through a series of quantum computers in the form of poetry for the military. While the predictions always come true, his most recent analysis mandates that all military branches must prepare for “interaction with non-human intelligence” and that first contact in “imminent.”
Meanwhile, Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck Cherokee man from Spiro just got custody of his daughter, Tawny, an angry 13-year-old who he hasn’t been there for, for most of her life, especially after she lost her little brother. As he makes attempts to win her over, reconnect back to his culture and just try to be a decent guy, the unknown begins to spiral in his own backyard.
Dr. Mikayla Johnson, a NASA astrophysicist headquartered in Houston, Texas, discovers that the Voyager I spacecraft launched in the 1970s has detected an anomaly of great mass pass by it in the heliopause region of outer space and is heading toward earth.
“Hole in the Sky” is fiction based on real science and Wilson’s background as a threat forecaster for the United Stated Air Force.
“In the genre like horror and science fiction, you’ve just seen the same perspective again and again. I love robot uprisings. I love alien invasions, but it’s time to look at that from a new perspective, to have some different people go through those experiences and see how they deal with it,” he said.
In addition to a new perspective, Wilson also wove in Cherokee cosmology and mythology into the story.
“Stuff like the star woman, the Judaculla (Tsu-da-gula), little people – just stuff that’s really fun because when you think about it … that’s science fiction. To me, that’s just Cherokee science fiction right there. I mean walking between dimensions, traveling from the Pleiades star constellation from the Seven Sisters, carrying people across outer space to here, that’s science fiction,” Wilson said.
With the release of the book, Wilson said his screenplay adaptation of the book has already been sold to Netflix with filmmaker Sterlin Harjo set to direct. Harjo is a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and a Muscogee (Creek) descendant. He has directed three feature films, one documentary film, as well as the FX comedy-drama series “Reservation Dogs” and “The Lowdown,” all of them set in his home state of Oklahoma.
“We talked about it while I was writing it. It’s super exciting to be able to represent Oklahoma as a character and just have an accurate representation of people, whether they’re Native or not, but out in that part of the country. Let’s see things from their point of view,” he said.
Wilson is also the New York Times bestselling author of “Robopocalypse.”
“Hole in the Sky” is available now wherever books are sold. For more information visit penguinrandomhouse.com and danielhwilson.com.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cherokeephoenix.org ’
