PORTLAND, Ore. \u2013 Where Indigenous knowledge meets science fiction, Cherokee Nation citizen and author Daniel H. Wilson released another mind-bending novel \u2013 \u201cHole in the Sky\u201d \u2013 on Oct. 7.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
From three different perspectives, Wilson takes readers on a journey of dealing with the unknown.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first character is an American threat forecaster only known as the \u201cMan Downstairs\u201d 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 \u201cinteraction with non-human intelligence\u201d and that first contact in \u201cimminent.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHole in the Sky\u201d is fiction based on real science and Wilson\u2019s background as a threat forecaster for the United Stated Air Force.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the genre like horror and science fiction, you\u2019ve just seen the same perspective again and again. I love robot uprisings. I love alien invasions, but it\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In addition to a new perspective, Wilson also wove in Cherokee cosmology and mythology into the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cStuff like the star woman, the Judaculla (Tsu-da-gula), little people \u2013 just stuff that\u2019s really fun because when you think about it \u2026 that\u2019s science fiction. To me, that\u2019s 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\u2019s science fiction,\u201d Wilson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cReservation Dogs\u201d and \u201cThe Lowdown,\u201d all of them set in his home state of Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe talked about it while I was writing it. It\u2019s super exciting to be able to represent Oklahoma as a character and just have an accurate representation of people, whether they\u2019re Native or not, but out in that part of the country. Let\u2019s see things from their point of view,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wilson is also the New York Times bestselling author of \u201cRobopocalypse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHole in the Sky\u201d is available now wherever books are sold. For more information visit penguinrandomhouse.com<\/a> and danielhwilson.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cherokeephoenix.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PORTLAND, Ore. \u2013 Where Indigenous knowledge meets science fiction, Cherokee Nation citizen and author Daniel H. Wilson released another mind-bending novel \u2013 \u201cHole in the Sky\u201d \u2013 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2094575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[395404,341174,395402,395405,395406,395407,395403,351338],"class_list":["post-2094574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-astronomy","tag-cherokee","tag-first-contact-science-fiction","tag-heliosphere","tag-muscogee","tag-pleiades-greek-mythology","tag-spiro-mounds","tag-sterlin-harjo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Wilson-releases-science-fiction-thriller-\u2018Hole-in-the-Sky.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2094574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2094576,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094574\/revisions\/2094576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2094575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2094574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2094574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2094574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}