Portland author Daniel H. Wilson’s new book, “Hole in the Sky,” is a thriller that combines Indigenous knowledge with science fiction.

Set in the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, the book recounts a strange atmospheric disturbance observed by science experts and residents who soon face the challenge of making first contact.

The book draws on Wilson’s own background as a threat forecaster for the US Air Force and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

OPB’s Paul Marshall II spoke with author Daniel H. Wilson about the book “Hole in the Sky.” The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Paul Marshall II: This book is set in Oklahoma, with one of its backdrops being the Spiro Mounds. What about this place made it the best choice of location for this story?

Daniel H. Wilson: It’s a really mysterious and interesting place. So, the Spiro Mounds are the ruins of the westernmost outpost of the mound builder civilization. This is considered to be the precursor civilization to most of the North American tribes that we know today.

These mounds used to be all over North America. There were these giant earthworks that contained artifacts, sometimes burial chambers. They were used for rituals and ceremonies, and most of that’s lost to us today.

I grew up a couple of miles from Spiro, and I spent my summers on my grandparents’ farm, which was our original Indian allotment after the forced removal of the Cherokee people. I’ve always thought of it as having the Egyptian pyramids in my backyard. I’ve just always wanted to go back there and revisit that place to tell a story.

Marshall II: When working on this book, did you go back to the Spiro Mounds to get a feel for it again?

Wilson: Absolutely, I went back and walked the mounds with my brother. We went back to Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and did research.

One interesting thing is that I sold the film as a Netflix adaptation at the same time as the novel. I’m also adapting this for a film with a guy named Sterlin Harjo directing. Sterlin made “Reservation Dogs,” and he made “The Lowdown.”

Sterlin and I actually walked the mounds together and realized that they’re not that tall, so we’re going to need some stunt mounds for the film. We tried to get out there and let it seep into my bones and let it get into my head so that I could properly kind of channel it into the novel.

Marshall II: When people talk about science fiction, they tend to think futuristic, but when they talk about Native culture and things, they think about the past or so far back in the day. In the book, you have this intersection with the past and the future between the Natives and the cosmos. How challenging was it to balance both those sides when writing?

Wilson: They say write what you know.

I’m telling stories to the characters that fall out of people that I know in this world that I came from, and that means a lot of native stuff. I also spent a lot of time getting a PhD in robotics and building robots in the basement laboratory, and there’s a lot of science fiction in my life too.

It’s true. I feel like I’m living here at this intersection where I’m describing the future from a perspective that’s been relegated to the past. It’s a perspective, especially in this genre, I think has largely been ignored or marginalized or just drawn in stereotypes. And so I went out looking for futuristic Indigenous stuff in particular among Cherokee oral traditions, mythologies, and cosmologies. There’s a lot of really futuristic stuff if you look at it from the right perspective.

Even just looking at the Spiro Mounds, which predate the Cherokee, they’re laid out in the pattern of the Pleiades constellation, which is also known as the Seven Sisters. From the very beginning, this is all tied to the cosmos.

All people have looked up at the stars and wondered who might be out there, and so it felt very natural to lean into some of these cosmologies and what I’m thinking of as Cherokee science fiction and bring it into this novel.

Marshall II: One of the characters in your story, Jim Hardgray, who has his own struggles (with his cultural ties and his own family relationships), feels very much forsaken in the story. How did you navigate writing Jim to give him a sense of resolve in the end?

Wilson: A lot of times, our cultures and our traditions give us a framework for understanding the world and where we exist in it. And when things go really wrong, sometimes you can abandon those traditions and things because they’re not working.

Jim and his teenage daughter, Tawny are really the heart of this story. Jim lives in Spiro. He’s Cherokee, and he has a teenage daughter that he hasn’t seen in a long time.

He’s reuniting with her when we start the book.

Part of what he has to do in order to survive this first contact is to reconnect with his perspective on the unknown. He’s acknowledging and not just respecting but acknowledging that the unknown is literally all around us., I grew up visiting my grandfather and his single-wide trailer in Wagner. It’s just a very familiar world to me, and it was my favorite sort of thread of the story. I also have a teenage child who’s complicated and sometimes mean, sometimes nice.

That was the most personal aspect of telling this story was allowing Jim to navigate his way back to those traditions that help him understand his life and where he’s at in the cosmos and and just how to move forward.

Marshall II: When it comes to dealing with the unknown, you have characters in the book who have different reactions to how to address the unknown. What did you draw from when writing the characters and their different reactions?

Wilson: We have a character named Gavin who is a CIA analyst, and he comes from experiences I had doing threat assessment, which is a really cool thing where, over the years, I’ve done a little bit of contract work for the United States Air Force. I was a part of the Blue Horizons. It’s a kind of internal think tank with the goal of institutionalizing out-of-the-box thinking for the military. If you consider 9/11 to be just a failure of imagination, something that they could have prevented, you know, if somebody had thought of it, then this is the solution.

The Air Force hires an occasional science fiction author and pairs them with an analyst who has security clearances, and then you get briefed on some kind of potentially threatening technology, and you write a science fiction story describing that technology being misused. This is much easier for people to read than like a 100-page white paper full of technical specifications.

I attended security conferences and met military people, and realized the Air Force is for real and very worried about unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, and what they used to call UFOs.

That really got me thinking hard about first contact, and so that informed Gavin’s character. He’s very much the typical government response to this kind of thing, and in just about any other movie or book. Gavin would be the hero. We’ve seen that many times.

He spent his whole life knowing the answers, and I actually really enjoyed this character because, to some level, I’m deconstructing it because he’s really just slowly learning over the course of the novel, that he does not have all the answers, and destroying it is maybe not gonna be as easy as he thought.

I spent a lot of my life as a scientist, and so Mikayla Johnson is my NASA character and she’s the kind of person you would meet in a computer science program, somebody who’s very logical in their outlook on the world, and their goals, and their modes of interacting with other human beings.

In the book, she’s a NASA astrophysicist. She’s Black, she’s female, she’s young, and she’s just not what people imagine when they think of a NASA astrophysicist. Outside of NASA, people are judging her for not acting the way they think she should, and when she’s inside NASA, she’s also being judged. She’s the character that’s most at risk of just rejecting humanity, and I think that whenever you’re pursuing science, you can do that at the expense of human relationships.

Sometimes it’s much more appetizing to devote yourself to a world of order where things make sense and humans are complicated.

Marshall II: What do you want readers to take away from this book?

Wilson: There are native people in the future.

There’s value in looking at the unknown from a different perspective and not just fear and the urge to destroy it, or, you know, curiosity and the urge to break it up into pieces and understand it.

It’s possible that we are going to undergo first contact.

I mean, that sounds totally crazy, but you should just remember that it’s something that’s happened before. History is kind of a whole long progression of human beings redefining where they think they are in the cosmos and in relation to the unknown.

We don’t have to be afraid.

Having a bit of an outside perspective on this, maybe a slightly more native perspective than what I consider a native perspective anyway, could insulate us from those types of shifts in our thinking and could maybe even save us.

Wilson will be speaking at Powell’s Bookstore on October 15th with OPB’s Aaron Scott.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/15/portland-author-daniel-wilson-new-thriller-indigenous-knowledge-science-fiction/