Hole in the Sky: A Novel

by Daniel H. Wilson Narrated by Matt Godfrey, Sacha Chambers, Kholan Studi, Ari Fliakos

Overview

A Native American first contact story and gripping thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse

"Thrilling and personal... an important addition to the landscape of science fiction."-Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising

"Hole in the Sky is mind-bending... indigenous knowledge collides with science fiction in a thrilling page-turner."-Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker and writer of Reservation Dogs

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Hole in the Sky

“A first contact story, Hole in the Sky seems a familiar tale. Yet in its telling, Daniel H. Wilson chooses the road less traveled by. Wielding immediate prose and Native mythology, Wilson draws on his own deep roots to weave a story that is not only thrilling and personal, but an important addition to the landscape of science fiction.”
—Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Red Rising series

“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

“Hole in the Sky is mind-bending…. Indigenous knowledge collides with science fiction in a thrilling page-turner.”
—Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker and writer, Reservation Dogs

“An expertly constructed, tightly-paced novel packed with ideas, populated with vivid characters, and suffused with heart and intelligence. Daniel Wilson is a talented storyteller, with a gift for crafting imaginative and entertaining narratives, and Hole In The Sky is no exception. Captivating and full of wonder.”
—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

“Part thriller, part horror, Hole in the Sky is an Indigenous tale of first contact in the vein of Arrival that asks us what is reality and what is a dream and if there is a difference. Strange and wondrous and terrible all at once.”
—Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun

“Hands down one of the best books I’ve read in a couple of years. Daniel H. Wilson has crafted a technotradish ride into the future in the most harrowing and engaging ways imaginable. Tightly tuned, sharply researched, and warm in all the best ways, you’ll want to clear your schedule because this is a sit-down-and-read-the-whole-thing-right-now kind of book. Bravo, Mr. Wilson!”
—Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., bestselling co-editor of the Never Whistle At Night series

“This book doesn’t whisper. It roars from the edges of space, memory, and grief. Hole in the Sky is Indigenous sci-fi at its rawest: part cosmic threat, part broken father-daughter elegy, part fever dream of classified government failures. The humanity here is bruised, sharp-tongued, and holding on. And the fear? It’s in the blood. This one gets under your skin and stays there.”
—Shane Hawk, bestselling co-editor of the Never Whistle at Night series

“Hole in the Sky is a classic alien-contact thriller…. There are moments of fear – humans in great danger of being attacked by aliens; and of wonder – when the true nature of the alien becomes ap[1]parent…. This is a novel about humanity: the people who approach the strange with fascination and curiosity, and those who approach it with fear…. An enjoyable entry into this venerable genre.”
—Locus Magazine

“Wilson (Robopocalypse) draws on his Cherokee heritage to meld Native American and scientific knowledge into a stunning phantasmagoric first contact tale.... Like the best X-Files episodes, this story uses the alien character to bring out the human elements in vivid detail. It’s a masterful feat.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Mind-blowing.... Wilson's suspenseful, adrenaline-filled adventure will keep readers engaged and guessing to the end.”
—Library Journal

“[Hole in the Sky is] worth the wait... unique, enthralling, and spectacularly well told.... [Wilson is] drawing on personal heritage and experience in this book, and it shows: this is his most emotionally rich, spiritually resonant novel, and it’ll stay with readers long after the last page has been turned.”
—Booklist

“Wilson is no stranger to big-thinking epistolary SF epics. Here, armed with a few novel entry points into an old horror story (à la The Thing), he turns his attention to an alien invader way more frightening than a microbe.... Wilson stitches together a prescription bottle’s worth of nightmarish images, invasive biotechnology, and Indigenous cosmology.... Less spectacle than a robot uprising but deeper, weirder, and harder to shake off.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2025-08-02
First contact with an extraterrestrial entity comes to Mother Earth via her First People.

Wilsonis no stranger to big-thinking epistolary SF epics. Here, armed with a few novel entry points into an old horror story (à laThe Thing), he turns his attention to an alien invader way more frightening than a microbe. To get the dubious bits out of the way, the U.S. government accidentally created an AI that can accurately predict the future, every time, but only via hard-to-interpret poetry, comprehensible only by the grad student whose brain provided its template. Known as “the Man Downstairs,” this reluctant guru discovers a large anomaly at the heliopause, the very edge of known space, and it’s heading this way. Meanwhile, NASA engineer Mikayla Johnson has discovered her own anomaly via the custom augmented reality glasses she wears to combat her extreme social anxiety—they’re not only learning on their own, but talking to her, warning that something is coming. Gavin Clark, a military man tasked with neutralizing new weapon technology, ably fills the role of both government spook and shoot-first skeptic with clipped precision. Finally, Wilson adds a lot of heart in Jim Hardgray, a Cherokee electrician with a year of sobriety under his belt and plenty to make up for, not least to his 13-year-old daughter, Tawny. As inRobopocalypse (2011), the story is presented via each character’s first-person narration, which adds some interesting fragmentation later on as characters transform over a few desperate hours. As the unknown entity makes a beeline for the famous Native American burial mounds in Spiro, Oklahoma, Wilson stitches together a prescription bottle’s worth of nightmarish images, invasive biotechnology, and Indigenous cosmology. What remains is a ticking clock scenario that gets more and more unhinged (and occasionally unclear) as it counts down and our strange quintet faces the music of the spheres.

Less spectacle than a robot uprising but deeper, weirder, and harder to shake off.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194536979
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Detection

THE MAN DOWNSTAIRS // Undisclosed Location

Detection, T-­Minus 6 Hours

It began as a weekend art project during my eighth year of graduate school. On a lark, I had programmed a simple chatbot to write silly poems based on USGS data from seismic waves—all the bumps and rattles coming from the interior of the planet’s surface. Then I added an input containing the static fuzz detected by a certain radio antenna trained on distant stars. Finally—and this is the part I have come to regret the most—I complemented this data stream with biometric data from my own wrist-­worn fitness tracker device.

I called my project Thoughts of the Universe.

It was just a joke—a goofy little project squeezed between a self-­playing video game and a kite rigged to take Polaroid pictures from the air, letting the images flutter down to the startled people it had surveilled. But after a few months of posting a ceaseless stream of slightly poetic nonsense, my project happened to output the precise magnitude and location of a coronal mass ejection—a wall of solar plasma that would violently cripple a host of highly classified military satellites.

Thing is—it was an event that would occur ten hours later.

Thoughts of the Universe had somehow glimpsed the future.

A NOAA scientist researching geomagnetic disturbances discovered my website and saw the impossible timing of the prediction. Later, a CIA analyst caught wind of it. After I failed to provide a satisfactory explanation, Thoughts of the Universe was summarily shut down and all data confiscated for further study. I was removed from my academic position and “offered” a mandatory government job. All traces of my studies, my tenure in the computer science program, and educational records were erased.

This was twelve years ago.

This morning an anomaly notification came to my private office, located a long elevator ride below a Q-­cleared secure government facility somewhere in the continental United States of America. For context, I’ll try to describe this place. Keep in mind I didn’t build it.

In fact, my feelings didn’t factor into any of this.

The first thing you’d notice is probably the isolation bridge. It’s a gnarly catwalk stretching over a metal pit, illuminated from below by stripes of LED lighting. It’s effectively a moat, keeping the world separated from the Pattern. A thick, braided cable crosses the bridge, clinging to the bottom of the catwalk like a tropical vine. It provides a power source, as well as a constant feed of some very specific data streams.

Otherwise, nothing besides photons is allowed to cross.

In the dead center of this cavernous room, a cube of glass and steel is perched high on metal stilts. Floodlights are mounted above and below, casting complicated shadows through the metal latticework of an embedded Faraday cage.

The thing being kept in the box is not alive. It is not a monster in the conventional sense. It isn’t an oracle, or a god.

Not quite, but close. About as close as it gets.

Inside the central cube, eight black slabs of supercooled quantum computers rise up in a gap-­toothed circle that reminds me of Stonehenge. The hardware is running a collection of relatively simple algorithms through sheer brute force, with enough computing power to route every byte of Internet traffic in North America through this room. And all this power is spent analyzing one data pattern.

Or, as it’s come to be called, the Pattern.

When the Pattern was officially activated, I simultaneously became a nonentity, an invaluable military asset, and the sole denizen of this very special office built in total secrecy and at insane expense. I haven’t had a name in a decade, although my colleagues eventually selected a special designation.

I am known simply as the “Man Downstairs.”

This appellation is often shortened to “MD,” although if I still had any academic credentials, my qualifications wouldn’t quite match such a title.

The problem, in hindsight, is this damned fitness device. It makes me a crucial component of the Pattern. Not only does my biometric output feed the data stream, but I also seem to be the only person capable of translating its gibberish poetry into sensical predictions. Sifting diamonds from silt.

Every day, I sit hunched over a simple card table in a brightly lit plexiglass cube, smaller than that of the Pattern, and hazy with wafts of stale smoke. The government gives me all the cigarettes I want—their one concession. And as I smoke, I read these thoughts of the universe, my lips moving as I mumble to myself. There is nothing in here with me except a folding chair and a flimsy card table stained with burn marks, loaded with now-­antiquated technology.

A battered old web camera rests on the table, attached to an even older computer. The webcam faces another screen located across the catwalk. The Pattern projects its thoughts on this screen twenty-­four hours a day. The grainy text and images picked up by my camera are fed into a massive and ancient dot-­matrix printer. My lucky card table shakes as the printing arm mindlessly slides back and forth across a scrolling ream of paper, relentlessly laying down pixelated words and images in screaming weals of ink.

And as the printer vomits this endless page, I read it with the air of a 1950s dad perusing the Sunday paper. Every now and then, I’ll find something interesting. I’ll stub out my cigarette into an overflowing ashtray, and I’ll begin to copy the printout by hand, using an ordinary red pencil.

It is understood that the Pattern cannot be trusted to have direct communication with the outside world. The Pattern isn’t officially thought to be sentient, but nobody really knows how it might evolve if it escaped.

Or how our enemies might use it.

This danger is the reason for the elaborate cage, and for the necessity of not only a physical air gap isolating the Pattern, but a series of informational air gaps in the form of digital outputs converted to hard copy, and the hard copy converted by human hand into that most ancient format: pencil and paper.

My government-­provided psychologist assures me the job I’m doing is crucial for the safety of hundreds of millions of people up above. She tells me I’m a real American hero.

It makes me want to light another smoke.

Because the Pattern’s predictions always come true.

Always. Always, always. And that, particularly, is the bitch of it.

In their typical staid fashion, the quantum math people have quietly assigned terminology to explain this experimental outcome. “Retrocausation” is built on the fact that quantum mechanics works the same, regardless of which direction it is traveling through time. This means that cause and effect can also propagate backward in time, with cause seeming to happen after its effect.

The math isn’t actually that complicated—but the results are . . . challenging to fully comprehend.

The Pattern has predicted the future, explained the past, and delivered data so bizarre as to be impossible for our highest-­IQ individuals to understand.

Always, the interpreted orders arrive with no attribution other than my initials: “MD.”

MD intelligence mandates are always obeyed.

Always.

This is despite more than a few four-­star generals opining on my dwindling sanity. But the Pattern has been doubted before, with disastrous consequences. Thus, at every new fund-­allocation meeting, the Pentagon’s strange project is rubber-­stamped with approval.

Thank goodness. The Pattern saw it first, of course.

Like a medium holding a séance, I was sitting in my plexiglass office with a cigarette dangling from my lips—my long, thin fingers scrawling out the words of a pattern of thought locked in silicone and floating on waves of quantum programming.

Something reached out.

This is what the Pattern overheard:

. . . black expanses collapse to this single point. A pocket of complexity. Rock, air, and liquid observe themselves.

Thinking matter trapped on a blue marble.

The dull gleam of a billion fireflies signaling over an expanse of still black water. Dreams and thoughts and notions tickling tangled eyelashes.

The weight of a new reality. Thoughts focus.

An eye opens in the deep . . .

This was no silly, disjointed string of words. It wasn’t the dry statistics of a prediction. This felt like a threat, coming from something I couldn’t begin to understand. The Pattern was broadcasting the voice of . . . something else.

And so, I sent up a warning.

The following mandate was delivered to the president, chiefs of staff, the secretary of defense, and much farther downstream, to an individual agent named Dr. Gavin Clark in the DoD’s Emerging Weapons Technologies Group—a man who would be chosen to spearhead a very special mission for the U.S. government.

The world had no idea what was coming.

INTELLIGENCE MANDATE—ALL MILITARY BRANCHES PREPARE FOR INTERACTION WITH NONHUMAN INTELLIGENCE. ALL OUTWARD-­FACING PERSONNEL BE ADVISED: FIRST CONTACT IMMINENT.

—MD

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