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I see technology. I see spirits. They are the same thing,” writes Daniel H. Wilson at the climax of his latest novel Hole in the Sky. And indeed, the relationships between science and faith, and between human invention and mysticism, are at the core of the book’s narrative, which follows the arrival of a potentially apocalyptic threat from the cosmos and chronicles the efforts of the scientists trying to make sense of it. When human technologies become increasingly indistinguishable from magic, Wilson suggests, we would be wise to have respect for the limits of our own knowledge.
Wilson is not new to apocalyptic fiction. After completing his Ph.D. in robotics, he wrote a string of techno-thrillers, including Robopocalypse, Amped, and Robogenesis, which explore humanity’s struggle with machines that alter and endanger civilization as we know it. So realistic and detailed were the techno-risks posed by his work that Wilson was asked to participate in threat forecasting for the United States military, analyzing how various technologies could be used to nefarious ends.
From unidentified flying objects and other anomalous phenomena to wearables that infuse users with godlike powers to interstellar space travel, Hole in the Sky weaves together an array of current and future tech concepts, all cast through a prism of Native American folklore inspired by the author’s Cherokee heritage. Nautilus spoke with Wilson about the shamanic aspects of science, the television series Alien Earth, the meaning of techno-tradish, and his greatest techno-fear: that the U.S. is fast becoming an inescapable surveillance state.
This novel really revolves around our relationship with the unknown.
You have a Ph.D. in robotics, so I’m presuming that you have a pretty good grasp of technology and science. When you’re working on a book like this, how much do you pull from that science background, and how much do you depend on your imagination?
I love doing worldbuilding and making sure that everything hangs together, but also you want to be surprising and do fun things. In this one, I stuck to some pretty realistic stuff, but then I got loose and a little crazy with the native mythologies and cosmologies.
In terms of the real-world stuff, I’ve done some threat forecasting for the United States Air Force, where they get a science-fiction author to come in, pair you with an analyst, brief you on technologies they’re worried about, and you write these realistic scenarios in which people use the technology in bad ways. Having done that and interacted with some of the military folks, I built one character from all that experience.
And then I have some pretty fun bits where I fool around with quantum computing and the idea of retro-causality, which is this idea that quantum mechanics unfolds moving forward in time the same way it unfolds moving backward. The math goes either way, which means things that happen in the future can affect things that are happening now. I’m not trying to predict the future or anything like that anymore with my science fiction. I’m more focused on the human stories in what I write, and I try to let the science fiction amplify whatever that human story is that’s happening underneath.
Where did the ideas for Hole in the Sky come from?
I grew up in the Cherokee Nation in North Tulsa. It’s a sovereign tribal nation that sits on top of state and federal boundaries close to a place called Spiro Mounds, which are the ruins of the mound builder civilization, the native people before the tribes we know today. They were earthen mounds, so most have been bulldozed, and people don’t even know about them. They’re super ancient. The Spiro Mounds are literally laid out in the same pattern as the Pleiades constellation—the Seven Sisters.
According to Cherokee cosmology, these mounds have an impact on the cosmos, and certain stories that go with them. I wanted to dive into that kind of mythology and cosmology, what I consider native science fiction. The Cherokee have a story about the star woman who came from the Pleiades constellation and brought Cherokee people to planet Earth. That’s just science fiction—spaceships and natives flying through space. I wanted to dig into that, go back to where I was from, use this really cool setting, and merge Indigenous science fiction with the techno-thriller style I’ve been writing for so long. One reviewer called it “techno-tradish,” being raised traditional. I thought that was pretty cool as kind of a new genre.
In your book, the Man Downstairs, also known as MD, has kind of a shamanic role. He’s working with science, but those around him have to believe what he says and take it on faith. What do you think of that shamanic tension between science and faith?
This novel really revolves around our relationship with the unknown. That’s why I chose my three main characters. You have a soldier who wants to destroy the unknown—he’s afraid of it. You have a scientist who wants to break the unknown apart, understand it, exploit it. And then you have a native character who lives where this all is going down, and he’s just living with the unknown. If you think of science and the military as Western perspectives, they’re kind of angry postures toward the unknown. Then you have a more faith-based posture—“I don’t need to understand every detail, I know we’re all part of the same thing.” I was playing with those tensions intentionally.
The native character, Jim, has lost his young son, who drowned. He’s reuniting with his daughter, who he hasn’t seen in a couple years in the aftermath of that. He considers himself forsaken. He has lost touch with his cultural roots, because it hasn’t been working for him. But as you get into the novel, you realize none of these individuals is the big square-jaw hero who’s going to come in and blast the aliens to pieces. It’s more complicated than that. All of these perspectives are necessary to make it through and survive the unknown.
As long as you don’t fiddle with the brain too much, I feel like you’re still a human being.
You write, “Reality is made of conscious and the unconscious, both at the same time.” You go on to explain that we have to have respect for the unknown. Do you think there’s a limit to what science can know?
Yeah, absolutely. People have mentioned there’s a little bit of cosmic horror in this. Our brains are creating reality in real time. The reality we’re experiencing is dictated by what’s kept us alive and reproducing all the way back. There’s all kinds of stuff our reality doesn’t concern itself with, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Titanic forces can be moving just out of sight—the real cosmic Cthulhu type stuff.
There are limits to what our science can unveil. At some point we have to live with the unknown and respect that it’s there. Part of me is thinking about this because of all the unidentified anomalous phenomenon and video coming out. In my work with the Air Force, talking to generals, they’ve said, “We don’t know what this stuff is. There could really be first contact.” That’s scary to think of. But we’ve done it before. Copernicus realized everything doesn’t rotate around Earth. Suddenly, everything people believed to be true was wrong. It took us down off our pedestal. History is one long voyage of discovery where we learn we’re less important than we thought. This next round—how it affects people—will be based on their outlook toward what they don’t or can’t understand.
I feel like Native culture tends to be more comfortable with the unknown. If you look at Cherokee oral traditions before Christianity, the stories were shades of gray. No good guys or bad guys, more like tricksters. No winning or losing. Then Christianity gets introduced, and the stories start changing. You start to see heroes, villains, good and evil. That wasn’t in the DNA of the culture. The DNA of the culture was being comfortable with things being good and evil at the same time, not having the answer all the time.
What do you think about this sudden explosion of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) in the news? Do you think we’ve already been visited by extraterrestrials, or that we will be in the near future?
My thoughts have evolved over time. Since 2006 or so, I’ve been on a radio program called Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. Everyone’s super into aliens on this show—it goes all night. When I first went on, I thought there’s no way, it’s silly science fiction. But then I went to the Aspen Security Conference a couple years ago, and General Glenn VanHerck, who at the time was in charge of NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command, tasked with monitoring for aerospace threats] and NORTHCOM [United States North Command, oversees domestic defense] straight up said: “Yeah, these things are real, and we don’t know what they are.”
If there really are artifacts we don’t think are ours or any other nation’s, and we don’t know where they came from, then I’m sure they’ve had contact with us. That’s pretty wild to think of, but there it is. So I think it’s really timely and worthwhile to think of alien invasion stories that aren’t just colonial fear projections.
If you look at most alien invasion stories, the aliens show up, extract resources, destroy culture, destroy monuments, steal bodies—the pod people. They just want what we have. That’s what colonizers have done to Indigenous people forever. It’s this fear that what our civilization is founded on is going to happen to us. Why not think of it from a different perspective? Tell that fun story from a different cultural lens. Crack that genre.
You write that “Human beings plus technology equals superhuman.” Throughout the narrative, one of the characters fuses with her technology. At times, it seems like she’s herself, and sometimes it seems like she’s become a machine that even she can’t quite control. So, when humans fuse with technology, will we still be humans, and will we still be in control?
With that character, she’s kind of dissociated from humanity because she doesn’t feel like she belongs, and so she slowly is dissociating from the whole idea maybe even of being human. I’m watching [the television series] Alien Earth right now, and they’ve got the cyborgs talking to the full synthetics talking to robots that have human consciousnesses inside them, and then there’s regular humans. This is such a fun playground for science fiction, and I’ve played with it too. I wrote a book called Amped that was all about humans upgrading themselves. And my feeling is this: As long as you don’t fiddle with the brain too much, I feel like you’re still a human being.
But one thing that I’ve been contemplating lately is this notion of how much of our bodies and our embodiment as humans is all about that biological imperative of finding people you love, eating food you like—all of those things that human beings need to do to perpetuate the species, the reasons that we’re here. And then once you take away those biological imperatives—maybe you’re invincible now, or maybe you don’t live in a human body anymore, just something that looks like a human body—then are you really still human? And also, should you be?
You also write, “I see technology. I see spirits. They are the same thing.” Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
I was diving into the notion of Indigenous technology. There’s this feeling that whenever we see technology, we think of shiny gadgets and typically these Western ideas, but there’s a lot of advanced Indigenous technology—a lot of stuff in forest management and ecosystems—that Native people have figured out and that people just overlook. They can’t see that it’s technology because it doesn’t fit their idea of what technology is. And as we move through this novel and super weird stuff starts happening with this entity, Jim, our Native character, starts to realize that this entity is a type of technology, only it’s an Indigenous technology.
Your work deals with a lot of apocalyptic concepts and big, looming disasters. So for you, here in the real world, what would you say are your biggest global apocalyptic concerns?
Oh, man. Okay, well, don’t get me talking too much about this, but the main thing I’m worried about right now is that our whole society is turning into a system to funnel money from the people who have the least money to the people who have the most, particularly with AI and social media. Right now, all of our stock markets are doing really great while people are starving and going homeless, and it’s because it’s reorienting to take advantage of all of these AI technologies, but the AI depends on data. So this means that our whole civilization, our whole society, is being reorganized and it’s standing on this pedestal of needing data from everyday people at all times. And this, to me, feels very dystopian. They’re trying to get our data by putting wearables on us. They want us to be wearing cameras at all times. They’re putting cameras in our cars. They’re putting cameras everywhere under the guise of safety to get that data. We’re gonna start seeing humanoid robots in public, and they’re gonna be collecting data all the time. And so really this kind of surveillance society where we’re all just the product, and there’s a few billionaires from five companies, like in Alien Earth, that are just profiteering off of us to the brink of apocalypse—that’s the thing that I’m worried about.
I want to just start a movement: Just take a walk in the woods with no data. Leave your phone, take a walk in the woods. I mean, because that’s anathema to all of these guys. This is what they’re allergic to—the idea that you’re gonna be sitting for 10 minutes and not generating data. Look at China. That appears to be the direction we’re headed right now. It’s a bummer. 
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Lead image: kersonyanovicha / Shutterstock
