Mark Milligan / Utah Geological Survey
Images carved into Utah sandstone recall the “Sky People” of ancient Native American legends.
Centuries before the famous Roswell Incident, the native peoples of America were already telling their own stories about visits from beings from space — such as that of the “Sky People”, who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and maintain a special connection with the Cherokee Nation.
In your new romance Cherokee science fiction author Daniel H. Wilson combines traditional narratives from native peoples about visits from extra-terrestrial beings with the most recent speculation about UFOs — now also called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
The book offers a new perspective on the classic theme of first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, from the perspective of the indigenous peoples of North America, says .
Wilson considers that the typical “alien invasion” plot” tends to reflect, in a symbolic way, the real history of european colonization of the Americas.
“I love stories about robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, in an alien invasionthe aliens arrive and usually want extract resources, occupy our landstake our water, destroy our culture, enslave us”, explains Wilson in the latest episode of the podcast.
“It’s a barely disguised projection of fear that what the colonizers did to indigenous peoples can be done to our society. And it was from this idea that I started”, says the Cherokee author.
The writer also intertwined other elements of Cherokee mythologylike the supernatural figure known as Tsul ‘Kalu, a Judaculla. In tribal tradition, the Judaculla is a slant-eyed giant — a creature reminiscent of the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch.
In Wilson’s book, Judaculla has a brief but decisive presence. “If we think about a human embodiment of indigenous technologythat would be Judaculla”, says Wilson.
“Among the Cherokee of that time, the most advanced technological problems had to do with keep the ecosystem in balance, in order to sustain the entire community indefinitely, without overexploiting it — unlike what we have been doing for the last 200 years or more in North America”, notes the author.
Em Hole in the Skythere are plenty of “magic the cherokee way“, centered on the Spiro Mounds, a complex of centuries-old earthen buildings in eastern Oklahoma. But the plot also includes numerous references to the renovated US military interest in UFOs and UAPs — a part of the story that refers to another phase of the author’s life.
“At the time I was doing threat assessments for the Air Force — that’s where they find science fiction authors and pair them with analysts,” he said.
“They make us a briefing on potentially dangerous technology or interesting, and then we write a story, something fun and fictionalwhich demonstrates the possible capabilities of this threat. Senior managers read these stories to better understand the type of danger they may face”, explains the author.
Daniel Wilson was surprised to discover that military authorities took the phenomena very seriously unidentified aerial.
“No one is saying they are aliensbut we don’t know what they are, and we are deeply interested in discoveringbecause it is an important issue of national defense”, he stated.
“I left there thinking: my God… this sounds crazybut we can actually live a first contact situation during our lives”.
What if aliens really arrived?? In his book, Wilson imagines the reactions of intelligence experts, military leaders, scientists and ordinary people, including a Cherokee oil field worker and his daughter, and weaves them into an ingeniously complex plot.
Some twists Hole in the Sky are based on more daring aspects of space science, such as real journeys of NASA’s Voyager probes beyond the solar system’s heliopause — the limit where the solar wind stops being felt, held back by the tenuous pressure of the interstellar medium.
“If we think about our Sun like a bonfire in the infinite nightit’s at that point that the firelight dies — and then we truly enter the expanse between the stars,” Wilson describes. “And I thought, what better place to wake up something in the darkness than when you step out of the light of your own fire?”
The author was also inspired by recent observations of interstellar objects to describe the arrival of aliens. “Today we have ability to detect these objectsand they become increasingly intriguing — and, frankly, increasingly frightening and disturbing,” he says.
Turn real science into science fiction is nothing new for Wilson. Before dedicating himself to writing, he was a robotics researcher and received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University.
This experience served as the basis for books such as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, How to Build a Robot Army, Robopocalypse e Robogenesis. “This is what I do with my writing,” he says. “I was a scientist”.
A film adaptation of Robopocalypse has been in development for 15 years. “I hope that one day we will see a film Robopocalypsebut I’m not exactly holding my breath”, he admits. Hole in the Sky may soon arrive on the screen: Wilson is adapting the novel for Netflix.
