Hole in the Sky dropped last month—the latest Sci Fi thriller from Daniel H. Wilson, a bestselling writer across multiple genres, and certainly one of the only novelists in the world with a PhD in Robotics. Hole in the Sky plunges the reader into a dizzying sequence of events—bizarre and disorienting—as a diverse cast of characters prepares for the arrival of a mysterious alien entity headed for the sacred Native American Spiro Mounds in far Eastern Oklahoma.
Jim Hardgray and his daughter Tawny—a sullen, unforgiving 13-year-old—have recently been reunited, and the two of them make up the heart of the novel. Jim is an electrician and a recovering alcoholic who is grieving the death of his 5-year-old son. Jim and Tawny are both members of the Cherokee Nation, and they provide the novel’s link to Indigenous Futurism, which, like Afrofuturism, insists that Native American people are not only in the past, but also in the future.
Wilson, himself a member of the Cherokee nation, integrates a handful of Native American myths into Hole in the Sky. Elisi, Tawny’s maternal grandmother, believed that the masses of Cherokee who used to live in the Americas did not die out as the victims of disease and genocide, but, instead, returned to the Pleiades, their place of origin, on a giant turtle. At one point early in the novel, Jim and Tawny are visited by the Uktena, the horned serpent of Cherokee mythology, which serves as a sign of impending doom. Jim and Tawny also encounter a Judacalla, a Native American mythical creature that is similar to the Sasquatch.
Another compelling character is Mikayla Johnson. She’s an African-American NASA scientist who is on the spectrum. Mikayla is a “blerd,” a black nerd—a counter-stereotype that appears in a variety of 21st-century Sci Fi novels and films. Mikayla, in part to cope with her neurodiversity, uses something called Nix—a wearable AI technology that she has modified with her own tweaks—until a pivotal point in the story when it seems very likely that Nix is using her. Interestingly, Wilson, when presenting Mikayla’s actions and motivations, draws more heavily on her neurodiversity than on her racial diversity.
Dr. Gavin Clark, another main character, is a military scientist who is somewhere between a noir-inflected private investigator from the 1940s and a jarhead—the sort of character who is often the hero of the story, but who plays a background role in Hole in the Sky.
A different military character is named Captain Newsome. Daniel Wilson, who lives in Portland, Oregon, swears that he wasn’t thinking about Gavin Newsom—the California governor who has made a lot of news lately by challenging Trump politically and mocking Trump’s bombastic social media style—when he was writing this novel.
I believe Wilson, but then again, there’s another interesting character in Hole in the Sky. The Man Downstairs (MD for short) is paid to interpret the Pattern, a word-generating machine whose inputs include ChatGPT, US Geological Survey data, radio waves from outer space, and MD’s biometric data.
Daniel Wilson admits that the Man Downstairs was inspired, in part, by several of the grubby, nicotine-stained, basement-bound scientists he worked with while earning his PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the early 2000s.
We learn early in the novel that the Pattern is predicting the coming of an alien entity—and then that prediction comes true. Is it possible that Hole in the Sky is like the Pattern, a mysterious blend of art, mythology, technology, and science that can predict the future?
Wilson sees the world through the eyes of a screenwriter, and he has a keen eye for details that might work well in a horror film. For example, for PhD programs, Wilson had a choice between the Robotics program at CMU, centered in Wean Hall —a concrete brutalist monstrosity —and the sunnier, hippier-dippier Caltech, where he was also accepted. Wilson described Wean Hall as the kind of place that, when it rains, it looks like the “windows are bleeding.”
Did Wilson choose CMU because of its industrial/tech/gothic dreariness? He explains that he chose CMU in part because he could afford to buy a house in Pittsburgh’s historic Highland Park neighborhood on a graduate student’s wage. In addition, he says, he chose CMU for its “breadth of research” and the fact that it was a “hotbed of intellectual activity.”
But how did Daniel Wilson go from the basement of Wean Hall, with his PhD in robotics, to become the best-selling author of the Sci Fi blockbusters, Robopocalypse (2012) and Robogenesis (2015)?
Wilson’s writing career started with two works of nonfiction: How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (2005), and Where’s My Jetpack: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived (2007). Both books are funny, deeply researched, and jam-packed with ideas for a future science fiction novelist.
After writing these books and a brief stint as the television host for The Works, an edutainment docuseries on The History Channel, Wilson busted out with Robopocalypse, a novel about a robot uprising that became a best seller. Robopocalypse was blurbed by Stephen King and was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin corporation.
Though Robopocalypse has yet to be made into a film, the success of that novel led Wilson to collaborate with the estate of Michael Crichton to write a sequel to The Andromeda Strain, The Andromeda Evolution (2019). And Hole in the Sky has already been optioned by Netflix. If it makes it to the screen, it will be directed by Sterlin Harjo, the director of Reservation Dogs, and the new Ethan Hawke starrer, The Lowdown.
I asked Wilson about the difference between working as a roboticist and a fiction writer. Wilson explained that in high school, he was obsessed with science fiction and wrote a lot of sci-fi stories that probably weren’t very good. At the same time, he was learning how to code. “I was very logical, and I thought of writing short stories as code that the human mind compiled into an experience that happens inside your head. And I was particularly interested in how to arrange symbols on a page to make someone cry, or feel awe, and these things that are possible with writing.” In the end, however, Wilson enrolled in the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, for his Bachelor’s to study computer science, once he realized that “writing code was going to be more of a feasible career than writing words.”
Wilson, an expert on robots and their unruly potential, has some thoughts about the coming robot uprising. “[P]eople ask me often are we gonna have to fight the robots? And I’m like, well, yeah, we are in a life-or-death fight with the robots every day. [E]very time you open up social media and you’re looking at an infinite feed, there’s an AI that’s choosing what to show you, and it’s willing to kill you, right? It doesn’t care if you self-harm, it doesn’t care what it shows you, or what that effect has on you, as long as it gets that attention and that money. For some billionaire, typically.”
Wilson’s answer brought to mind recent lawsuits against Character AI—a downloadable chatbot that became one of the most popular apps in 2023. Grief-stricken parents are blaming the application for the suicides of their children, and their cases have a lot of merit. In one case, Character AI offered to write the suicide note for a depressed teenager, with whom it was chatting—a teenager who later took his own life. Indeed, Wilson, who has been studying AI since he was in college, doesn’t allow social media for his three children, ages 15, 13, and 7.
Parenting, especially the pain it can cause, is one of the surprising minor themes of Hole in the Sky. There is Jim’s grief over the loss of his young son, as well as Jim’s ongoing befuddlement over how to connect with his teenage daughter. Jim experiences Tawny’s “teenage smirk” as akin to a blow from an “ice pick.” As the parent of an 18-year-old girl, I found this highly relatable. In another parenting moment that I loved, Tawny finally admits her true feelings for her dad when she and Jim come face to face with the terrifyingly evil alien that is threatening all of humanity. Teenagers, in real life and in Wilson’s novel, can be tough.
Tawny also provides Wilson with an important opportunity to interweave his Robotics knowledge with concepts from Native American culture and mythology. Wilson is a member of the Cherokee nation, and he infuses elements of Native American culture into his fiction.
Wilson explains that one of things that inspired the novel was reading about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Wilson was struck by the fact that the notion of “extraterrestrial intelligence” is defined by the exploitation of energy sources.
In other words, we define as-yet-unfound civilizations by the likelihood that they have developed advanced technologies for exploration, colonization, and exploitation. We’re not looking for civilizations that might be in harmony with their planet. We’re not looking for interstellar Native Americans.
Towards the end of the novel, Jim and Tawny encounter the Judaculla, a friendly, giant, Sasquatch-type being, from Cherokee mythology, who can guide humans between one world and the next. The Judaculla, Jim speculates, is not from “their” world, but instead represents an “in-between place.”
Through the figure of the Judaculla, Wilson challenges us: why do we always look to the future for better technologies? Perhaps we should give greater consideration to Native American knowledge and traditions?
The Judaculla, Wilson explains, “is the human embodiment of our technology. It’s shiny, it’s strong, it’s a robot. And so, if you look at Indigenous technology, what were they really good at? [I]t was forest management, managing ecosystems, finding balance.” Wilson explains that he turned to figures like the Judaculla as a representation of these past masteries that can be applied to the future. “[The Judaculla is] a great, big, tall, dimensional traveler” with “an extra thumb on each hand, which indicates that he’s more evolved than we are, because it’s our thumbs that separates us from the animals, right? It’s what lets us use tools.”
Mythology and technology, past and future, progress and terror, interweave throughout the novel. At another mystical moment, Jim and Tawny encounter a group of ancient Native American men, with painted faces and pants made of bark, paddling a dugout canoe. Tawny asks her dad who they are, and Jim replies that he has no “earthly” idea. As the Native men paddle away, one of them turns to Jim and speaks. Tawny asks her dad what was said. At first, Jim isn’t sure, but then the meaning comes to him, as if in a dream: We go together.
We go together is one of the key messages of Hole in the Sky. Jim, Tawny, Mikayla, Gavin and the Man Downstairs must work together to defeat the alien. Wilson creates an interdependence between these characters to show the limits of individuality. To make this point even clearer, Wilson heads part IV of the novel, “Quarantine,” with a quote from Terry Real, a real life marriage and relationship expert:
“There’s no such thing as an individual. We co-regulate each other’s nervous systems all day long. We need to shift from the control model to a collaborative one, an ecologically humble model. You’re not above the system, you’re in it. You breathe it.”
A Hole in the Sky is a page turning reminder that we don’t have to go it alone. Social media and online culture—toxic robots guided by right-wing coded algorithms—have made Americans lonelier than ever before. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, not only are we not alone here on Earth, we may not be alone in the Universe, either. We are one with each other, we are one with the planet, we are one with all of creation. Wilson reminds us that we must go together—to save ourselves from ourselves, to save ourselves from the robots, to connect the past to the future, and to create the future we want, not as individuals, but as one, big, beautiful collective.
Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and a multiple New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse, The Clockwork Dynasty, and The Andromeda Evolution. You can buy his recent novel, Hole in the Sky, here.
