Acclaimed New York Times bestselling novelist and Ph.D. roboticist Daniel H. Wilson (“Robopocalypse,” “The Clockwork Dynasty,” “The Andromeda Evolution”) is one of the brightest minds in his field and an extremely good friend to have if some sort of robot uprising ever occurs around the globe.
His upcoming science fiction novel, “Hole in the Sky,” lands on Oct. 7, 2025, from his longtime publisher, Doubleday. It depicts a most unusual alien first contact event on a Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma, and has already been snapped up by Netflix and Aggregate Films for a feature film. Wilson will also act as an executive producer and adapt the screenplay from his own book.
Hollywood has a real appetite for Wilson’s brand of storytelling, and the Portland-based writer has at least a half-dozen Tinseltown projects in various stages of development.
“I had a book come out right when COVID started, so I switched over and started writing screenplays and television for a few years,” Wilson tells Space.com. “Then we had a big strike, and so there was a great time to put on my novelist hat and go back and write a book. This really digs into two of my favorite things: where I’m from in Oklahoma, and robots and science fiction. I was really inspired to have a native take on first contact. You see so many alien invasion movies, and they’re really a dark reflection of what colonizers have already done to indigenous people. The aliens show up, and it’s like fear projection. They enslave people, they extract our resources, they destroy our monuments and our culture. It’s kind of the same story.”
Wilson’s thought process while composing this extraterrestrial arrival tale was focused on what the native perspective would be on the unknown, particularly the Cherokee perspective since he was raised in what’s now the Cherokee reservation in North Tulsa.
“I’m a Cherokee citizen and I spent the summers with my grandparents on our original land allotment,” he explains. “It was about a mile or so away from this place called Spiro Mounds, which is the westernmost outpost of the Mound Builder civilization that disappeared thousands of years ago. But they’ve left these mounds all over the United States, and it’s this ancient and mysterious place. Those tribes were the precursor tribes to all the tribes we know now.”
“Hole in the Sky” starts out with NASA’s first observation of an interstellar object with its rapid approach and an impact on Earth that results in first contact.
“It’s told through the lens of a by-the-books CIA weapons expert, the sort of person you’d expect to deal with this stuff, an anti-social NASA astrophysicist, and a really determined Cherokee father who lives in the place where this happens,” Wilson adds. “All of these characters have a different perspective on the unknown. Typically, scientists want to understand it. Usually, they want to exploit it. Soldiers are afraid of the unknown, they want to destroy it. My native characters are comfortable with it. This guy lives with the unknown in his backyard. That was fun to tell that story and get to subvert that genre and put my own spin on first contact.”
Mound Builders had a massive civilization on the scale of the Mayans, mainly in the Eastern portion of the United States. These earthworks were created anywhere it was useful to have a city, a place that had commerce and was easily defensible. As a result of these ancient people’s engineering, many mounds were eventually bulldozed over and major cities built atop them.
“We’re talking about ten or fifteen thousand years ago, which plays into the story,” says Wilson. “There’s a lot of looking back to look forward. I ended up thinking a lot about what is indigenous technology. Right now, in Oregon, Washington, and California, they’re looking back at the way indigenous people dealt with their forests to prevent forest fires. They’re trying to find that old knowledge to apply it now.”
Netflix and Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films were offered a draft of Wilson’s book while the author and his agent pitched both the novel and the screenplay, which prompted constructive feedback that altered some elements of the story.
“I found the process really fun because film is so visual and you’re thinking about how to make it super visual, and some of that can go into the book,” he notes. “But in the book, you can go straight into people’s heads and get into what they’re thinking. That’s something that’s harder to do in a film and get all the exposition out. We spoke to a lot of top-notch production companies, really amazing minds, and each had a territory to go out to, different studios they work with. Aggregate hit it out of the park, and we found a great creative partner.
“I’m excited because we’re shooting for an “Arrival”-level film. Obviously, “Contact” was an influence, but really this is much more along the lines of “Stalker,” which is based on the book, “Roadside Picnic.” Like movies that are smaller in scope but very deep and heartfelt. “Hole in the Sky” takes place in Oklahoma, and it’s just as big of a character as anything in this film. It’s literally going back to where I grew up, which is very fun.”
“Hole in the Sky” will be published by Doubleday on Oct. 7, 2025.
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