Sci-fi thriller combines aliens, robots, and Cherokee culture

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday. Breaking news out of Eastern Oklahoma. A hole in the sky has opened, and through it an unidentified turtle shaped craft has descended. Alerts say this is first contact.

That is the plot of the sci-fi thriller Hole in the Sky, and I’m very sorry if you’re having War of the Worlds flashbacks. In the book, author Daniel H. Wilson imagines this moment where we first meet alien life, and everyone plays their role. The military dude wants to bomb it. The NASA scientist desperately wants to make sense of it. And Jim, a Cherokee man who’s watching all of this unfold in his backyard, is just trying to survive it.

So today we are talking with Daniel H. Wilson about his book, how he blended his Cherokee culture with sci-fi, and what our conception of aliens tells us about ourselves. Danielle, welcome to Science Friday.

DANIEL H. WILSON: Hey, thank you for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How long have you been a sci-fi consumer, not just a writer but a reader?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Oh, since I could read.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Yeah. I always just loved thinking about the future, thinking about technology. I loved short stories because they were often be set up like mouse traps where you read, you read and it’s a setup and then at the end it snaps shut and you just feel something. You either feel sad or amazed thinking of the 9 billion names of God, that sense of awe that you get on the last page, or Flowers for Algernon, where you just crumble.

So, yeah, I grew up loving that. I wanted to do that from an early age. It did not work out for me at age 16 unfortunately.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, also pursued science?

DANIEL H. WILSON: It was the consolation prize to science fiction, and I literally– I chose my early career path as if I was looking at a character sheet for Dungeons and Dragons. I was like let’s accumulate the robotics skill and let’s put, oh, artificial intelligence. Yes, let’s get that. So I literally just treated the whole thing like it was a role-playing game, and that’s how I chose my path.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s so fascinating. I want to talk about your book Hole in the Sky. It unfolds in Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. Tell us a little bit about this place, and do you have a connection to it?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Yeah. So I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the Cherokee reservation, and I would spend a good chunk of every summer out at my grandma’s farm, which was our original Indian allotment after forced removal. And the farm was just a couple of miles away from Spiro Mounds, which are the ruins left behind by the mound builder civilization thousands and thousands of years ago, and this is the civilization that gave rise to a lot of the modern tribes we today including the Cherokee.

So in Oklahoma, it’s that’s where you go on a field trip to the Spiro mounds and you walk around. But these mounds used to be all over North America, and they’re full of– they have burial chambers and artifacts. And they were sites where ancient ceremony and ritual. And so they’re just really mysterious interesting place to have in your backyard growing up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have you always wanted to set a book there?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Well, I did. I have used it before in a little known novel called A Boy and His Bot. But, yes, I have always– it’s– I’ve always wanted to do it because it’s a mysterious place, but it’s also got a little bit of sci-fi in it I think.

So the mounds are laid out in the shape of the Pleiades constellation, also known as the Seven Sisters, and this is a really important constellation to ancient people– the Mesopotamians, the Babylonians, civilizations like that. And so, yeah, there’s always been this oral tradition among the Cherokee about Star Woman, and this is a story about this woman who came down from the Seven Sisters and she carried Cherokee people to Earth and that’s how we got here. It’s the origin story for the Cherokee people.

And when she came down, she broke open in the first human stepped out of her. This story always felt like Native science fiction to me, and it’s right up my alley. So having the spiral mounds laid out in that constellation, having that star woman story, I just have always felt like this is the setting. Here’s the backstory. Let’s tell a story of a Native perspective on first contact with a non-human intelligence.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. And that is the lens of the book. Tell us a little bit about how that lens subverts our expectations about first contact.

DANIEL H. WILSON: Well, if you look at the typical invasion story, the aliens show up, and they want what we have. They want to extract our resources, take our land, our water. Sometimes they want to enslave us or destroy our culture or take our bodies and control us. And so all of that sounds really familiar, especially to Native people. I think that a lot of those stories are just really thinly veiled fear projections that aliens are going to arrive and they’re going to do to us exactly what colonizers have done to Indigenous people all over the world for a very long time.

And so with these stories, we’re looking into the cosmos and we’re seeing ourselves and we’re understandably freaking terrified. So I don’t think it’s any surprise that based on those assumptions that fear is the most common reaction to the thought of first contact, and I think that’s really well reflected in science fiction. And so I thought can we see that from a different perspective. Can we maybe look at this scenario through a different cultural lens? And, yeah, that became Hole in the Sky.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And it’s embodied by Jim, who’s a Cherokee man who’s living literally right next to where this alien entity lands. What is it about his mindset that prevents him from going to the worst possible place?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Yeah, this– I think that this has to do really with our posture toward the unknown. And I think that not speaking for everybody but in a lot of Indigenous culture, we’re comfortable with the unknown. It’s there. And I think that’s reflected in Indigenous technology, culture all up and down.

If you’ve got that military perspective like one of the characters, then the instinct is to destroy the unknown. It could be dangerous. I get that. And then the scientific perspective can be to take the unknown apart, break it down, and figure out how it works. Exploit it.

But Jim is coming from a perspective where he literally lives with the unknown in his backyard. And so he’s comfortable with it there, and he’s not making these assumptions that it’s here to kill him or that he needs to get over there and rip it apart and understand it immediately. And that sets him up to be able to contribute to the survival of the human race.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How do we become more comfortable with the unknown?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Well, I think that reading science fiction that takes on the unknown from different perspectives can be really useful. In this novel, I think we think a little bit about what is civilization, what is progress, what is technology. Do we have blind spots in terms of assumptions we’re making about what that looks like. And so it’s really great to be able to read and watch science fiction that really opens up your perspective on that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, technology and our dystopic relationship with technology is a huge part of this book. The aliens that we conjure up in our heads become these hybrid metal insect creatures. Technology fuses with human beings. At the same time, I know that you have a PhD in robotics. So I’m curious how do you think about yourself. Are you a techno optimist?

DANIEL H. WILSON: God, so I’m on a journey where I– certainly when I was 25 and studying robotics and building robots and working for large corporations, I was definitely a lot more optimistic than I am now. I think that really that optimism that when you look at it in society is really a reflection of trust. How much do we trust corporations? How much do we trust the government to look out for us?

And so right now I’m swept up in a wave of pessimism, and really this is a big part of why I tried to with this the entity in this novel and with all of the technology that we see in the novel, I tried to pull it toward this notion of Indigenous technology, which is different than what we typically think of as technology. We think of it as shiny and efficient and fast. And there are different perspectives on what that is, and I tried to explore that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What is Indigenous technology? How would you describe it?

DANIEL H. WILSON: So let’s look at this. So a common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, they looked out at these beautiful forests, and they compared them to the Garden of Eden. They were perfect. They were amazing. And it was clear that they were wasted on these primitive people that were actually living there.

And so I think that there’s a saying that’s appropriate here. Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that was the case for those settlers. They looked out at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was Indigenous technology. So the land had been manicured meticulously for hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff– I think that the key difference all of that stuff is not designed to scale up and out to feed an exponentially growing population. It was technology designed to create a sustainable balance.

And so I think to from a Western perspective, that just looks really inefficient, and that looks really primitive. And the reason is because they’re grading it on a different scale. How many millions of people will that feed? Well, it won’t. It’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep a certain number of people imbalanced to promote the long-term survival of that human population. And so I think that’s what defines Indigenous technology.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break but coming up, Daniel’s former day job thinking about aliens for real as a threat forecaster for the Air Force. Stay with us.

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Let’s turn to another chapter in your history. You worked as a threat forecaster for the Air Force. Tell us about it.

DANIEL H. WILSON: Over the years, I’ve done a little bit of contract work for the United States Air Force as part of something called the Blue Horizons Program. So this is an internal think tank with the goal of institutionalizing out-of-the-box thinking for the military. They consider 9/11 to have been a failure of imagination. It’s something that could have been prevented if only somebody had noticed that vulnerability.

To them, this is the solution to that. So the Air Force hires an occasional science fiction author, and they pair them with an analyst who has security clearance. And then you get briefed on some kind of potentially threatening technology. And then the author provides a highly realistic fictional story that outlines this sort of creative threat scenario so that people can understand it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This sounds like a good job just as an aside.

DANIEL H. WILSON: It’s a little bit of a surreal intersection between those two worlds. As part of this job, I had to teach a couple of classes. So you have this really weird situation where you’re explaining science fiction to a class full of uniformed United States Air Force cadets who are just out here writing science fiction for the good of their country like we all should.

So, yeah, it’s a little bit surreal. It’s pretty fun. So I wrote this threat assessment, and I ended up at the Aspen Security Conference to present about it. And I ended up talking to a four-star general, and during this conversation, we started talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, what they used to call UFOs. And it turns out that the United States Air Force is really concerned about these UAPs, and so partly I was a little bit offended that the Air Force was getting into my lane.

Leave the science fiction to me. But, I mean, this crazy intersection between these two worlds.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In what way did they find your insights useful do you think?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Well, I think being able to explore the human responses. The technology itself can read all about what they are, but part of writing science fiction is being really creative about how people are going to interact with it and what the unintended consequences will be. And so I’m just my hypothesis, but I feel that that’s probably the most useful aspect is they can see, oh, that technology can manipulate people because they care about their families as opposed to just a really dry list of technical capabilities.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are there sci-fi tropes that you can’t stand?

DANIEL H. WILSON: When the robots want to become people. That’s the one that always gets me. I always–

FLORA LICHTMAN: You feel like no way.

DANIEL H. WILSON: I’m like–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why.

DANIEL H. WILSON: I know. We’re awful. I just feel like, yeah, have some respect for yourself, robot. Go, go, do you and don’t worry about us. That’s why– it used to be one thing I couldn’t stand as a robotics student was all the Asimov stuff where there were psychologists that were fixing robots through conversation. And you know what. Asimov had the last laugh because when we finally do get near-human intelligence out of these LLMs, what do we do? We spawn a new class of prompt engineers who have to talk the robots into doing a good job. So, yeah, that’s one for you, Asimov.

FLORA LICHTMAN: On this show, we talk constantly about how science is this method for creating new knowledge. What do you see as the role of science fiction?

DANIEL H. WILSON: Well, I’ve never met a scientist who wasn’t inspired by science fiction, and me personally, I will choose my science fictional elements based on the theme I’m trying to push or the emotion that I’m trying to elicit because at the end of the day, media, it’s human. Science fiction has always I feel like got to embrace that humanity.

I know that there’s hard sci-fi. I know people love that. I’ve written it. But as I get older, I feel like it’s humanity that gives any of this stuff importance. And so without that out that context, it’s meaningless. And so that’s really I feel like the only burden that you carry is to respect that human element in your science fiction.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I would argue that’s the same for science, Daniel, that the humanity is what gives it its importance.

DANIEL H. WILSON: I think that’s playing itself out really clearly right now with tech billionaires. There’s this notion of doing something because you can, and I think that we’re increasingly seeing that that doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I think that when you’re looking at the science that’s being done academically and stuff like that, I never was able to get a grant or get a paper published without mentioning why it mattered to people.

So– beyond making money– so I think that academically I’m super behind science. It’s just that whenever it gets loose in a corporate world, sometimes people lose sight of what the point of it is.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, maybe that’s your next novel.

DANIEL H. WILSON: Oh, there’s a lot of dystopic scenarios that can stem from that. So, yeah, that’s a– that is fertile territory.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Daniel H. Wilson is a sci-fi writer, and his latest book, Hole in the Sky, is SciFri’s book club pick. And if you’re not part of our book club, what are you doing? Get on it. Read along with us. Head to sciencefriday.com/bookclub to join our community.

Daniel, thanks for chatting today.

DANIEL H. WILSON: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. Special thanks to Nate Shull at Oregon Public Broadcasting for making this sound so, so good. And if you would like to make first contact with us, please try giving us a ring at 877-4SCIFRI, 877-4SCIFRI. We listen to every single message, and we love hearing from you.

Thanks for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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