Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson

Please join Daniel H. Wilson and Cassie for a discussion of Wilson’s new book, Hole in the Sky (10/7), “a riveting thriller in the most creative tradition of extraterrestrial fiction.”

Tickets for this event are $5 general admission or book purchase. 

“Incredible… Hole in the Sky is not only a thrilling, brilliant page-turner, its pages also turned me into the kind of reader I always want to be—deeply involved and curious about the world and the story unfolding before me, as if by magic—the kind of reader who can’t stop reading, who dreads the book coming to an end even while I can’t stop making my way toward it, who goes back and starts all over to figure out how it was done. Here we have a highly original premise about alien contact—no small feat unto itself—which also manages to seamlessly fold in Indigenous lives and knowledge. Every character here is alive, and there are so many stunning sentences I had to stop underlining. The story is killer. I love it. Run don’t walk to read this book.” —Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There and Wandering Stars.

On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist Dr. Mikayla Johnson observes an interaction with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on the far side of the solar system, and she concludes that something enormous and unidentified is heading directly for Earth. And in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the United States, an American threat forecaster known only as the Man Downstairs intercepts a cryptic communication and sends a message directly to the president and highest-ranking military brass: “First contact imminent.”

Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a riveting thriller in the most creative tradition of extraterrestrial fiction. Drawing on Wilson’s unique background as both a threat forecaster for the United States Air Force and a Cherokee Nation citizen, this propulsive novel asks probing questions about nonhuman intelligence, the Western mindset, and humans’ understanding of reality.

Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogensis, as well as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, The Clockwork Dynasty, and The Andromeda Evolution (an authorized sequel to The Andromeda Strain). He earned a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as master’s degrees in machine learning and robotics. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.