¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Sci-Fi, Cherokee Culture, And First Contact
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 flashback.
In the book, author Daniel H. Wilson imagines this moment where we first meet alien life. And, you know, everyone plays their role. The military dude wants to bomb it, the NASA scientists. 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. Daniel, welcome to Science Friday.
Hey, thank you for having me.
How long have you been a sci fi consumer? Not just a writer, but a a reader?
Oh, I mean, since I could read. Um really? Yeah. I always just loved uh thinking about the future, thinking about technology. Um I loved short stories because they will often be set up like mouse traps where you read, you read, and it's sort of a setup and then at the end it sort of snaps shut and you just feel something. You either feel sad or um amazed, you know.
Um thinking of the nine billion names of God, that sense of awe that you get on the last page, or Flowers for Algernon, where you just crumble. Uh so yeah, I I grew up loving that. I wanted to do that from an early age. Um it did not work out for me at age sixteen.
Unfortunately. Well but you also pursued science, right?
It was the consolation prize to science fiction. And I literally I mean sh I chose my my early career path as if I was looking at a character sheet for Dungeons 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 mean I I literally just treated the whole thing like it was like it was a role-playing game. Um and that and that's how I chose my path.
That's so fascinating. I wanna talk about your book, Whole in the Sky. It unfolds in Spyro Mounds in Oklahoma. Tell us a little bit about this place and do you have a connection to it?
Yeah, so I grew up in um Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Cherokee Reservation. Um and I would spend a good chunk of every summer out at um my grandma's farm, which was our original Indian allotment after forced removal. And the farm was just a couple of miles away from Spiral Mounds, which
uh are the ruins left behind by the mound builder civilization thousands and thousands of years ago. And uh this is the civilization that gave rise to a lot of the modern tribes we know today, uh including the Cherokee. So You know, in Oklahoma it's kind of like that's where you go on a field trip. It's through the spiral mounds, you walk around.
Um, but these mounds used to be all over North America and they're full of, you know, they have burial chambers and artifacts and they were sites where of ancient um ceremony and ritual and so there's just really mysterious interesting place to kind of have in your backyard growing up.
Have you always wanted to set a book there?
Well I did I have used it before in a in a little known novel called uh a boy in his bot. But um yes, I have always it's I've always wanted to do it because, you know It's it's a mysterious place, but it's also got a little bit of sci-fi in it, I think. Um so the mounds are laid out uh in the shape of the Pleiades constellation, uh also known as the Seven Sisters. And this is sort of A really important constellation to ancient people. Um, the Mesopotamians, the Babylonians.
civilizations like that. Um and so uh yeah, there's always been this oral tradition among the Cherokee about Star Woman. And this is sort of a story about This woman who came down from the Seven Sisters and she carried Cherokee people to Earth, uh and that's how we got here. It's the origin story for the Cherokee people. And when she came down she broke open and the first human stepped out of her. This story always felt like
native science fiction to me. And I mean it's like right up my alley. So Um, having the spiral mounds laid out in that constellation, uh, having that Star Woman story, I just have always felt like this is the setting, you know, here's the backstory. Let's tell a story of a native perspective on first contact with a non-human intelligence.
Yes. And that is sort of the lens of the book, right? Tell us a little bit about how that lens subverts our expectations about first content.
Well, I mean, if you look at the typical invasion story the aliens show up and they want what we have. You know, they want to extract our resources, take our land, our water. Sometimes they want to enslave us or destroy our culture, uh, or take our bodies and control us. And so
I mean, all of that sounds really familiar, especially to to native people. Uh you know, I think that a lot of those stories are just really thinly veiled fear projections, you know, that aliens are gonna arrive and they're gonna do to us exactly what colonizers have done. To indigenous people all over the world for a very long time.
And so, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know,
Can we see that from a different perspective? Can we maybe uh look at this scenario through a different cultural lens and yeah, that became a hole in the sky?
And it it's embodied by Jim, right, who's a Cherokee man who's living like real 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?
Yeah, you know...
¶ Exploring Indigenous Technology Concepts
I think that this has to do really with our posture toward the unknown. And I think that, um, you know, not speaking for everybody, but in a lot of indigenous culture, we're comfortable with the unknown. You know, uh it's there. And I think that's reflected in indigenous technology, culture, uh, all up and down. You know, if you've got that military perspective, like one of the characters, then, you know,
The instinct is to destroy the unknown. It could be dangerous, you know. I get that. And then the scientific perspective can be to, you know, take the unknown apart, break it down and figure out how it works, exploit it. But um but Jim is coming from a perspective where he literally lives with the unknown in in his backyard. And so he's 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 kind of um that kind of sets him up to be able to contribute to the survival of the human race.
How do we become more comfortable with the unknown?
Well, I think that uh reading science fiction that uh that takes on the unknown from from different perspectives can be really useful, right? Like um You know, in this novel I think. we think a little bit about what is civilization, what is progress, what is technology. Um, uh do we have blind spots in terms of um assumptions we're making about what that looks like? And so um it's it's really great to be able to Read and watch science fiction that really opens up your perspective on that.
Yeah, I mean technology and our kind of like dystopic relationship with technology is a huge part of this book. I mean, the aliens That we conjure up in our heads become these sort of hybrid metal insect creatures. Technology fuses with human beings. You know, at the same time, I I know that you have a PhD in robotics, so I'm curious how how do you think about yourself? Are you a techno optimist?
God. So I'm on a journey uh where
Yeah.
I um certainly when I was twenty five, uh, and studying robotics and and building robots and working for large corporations, I was definitely a lot more optimistic than I am now. Um yeah, I think that really that optimism that when you look at it in society is a really a reflection of trust. Like how much do we trust corporations, how much do we trust
the government, um, to look out for us. And and so right now I'm swept up in a kind of a wave of pessimism. And really, I mean, I I this is p a big part of why I tried to with this the entity uh 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, you know, w what we typically think of uh as technology. We think of it as shiny and you know, and and efficient and fast and and uh there are different perspectives on what that is and I I tried to explore that.
What is indigenous technology? How would you describe it?
Okay, so la let's look at this. So I A common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, you know, 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. Right. Um and so
Um yeah, 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's was the case for those settlers. They looked out at at that at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was indigenous technology. So The land had been manicured meticulously for, you know, hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, uh, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff.
I think that the key difference, right? 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 like 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 in balance to promote, you know, the long term survival of that human population. And so I think that's what defines indigenous technology.
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.
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¶ Science Fiction In National Security
Let's turn to another chapter in your history. You worked as a threat forecaster for the Air Force. Tell us about it.
Over the years, I I've done a little bit of contract work for the United States Air Force uh as part of something called the Blue Horizons program. So Uh this is kind of an internal think tank with the goal of institutionalizing out of the box thinking for the military. Um, you know, they consider nine eleven 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 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, you know, understand it, right? And it's
Sounds like a good job just as an aside.
It's it's a little bit of a surreal intersection between those two worlds. I mean, uh as part of this job, I uh I had to teach a couple of Classes. So you have this really weird situation where you're explaining science fiction to like a class full of uniformed United States Air Force cadets. who are you're just out here writing science fiction for the good of their country, uh like we all should. Um so yeah, I mean it it's a little bit surreal. It's 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, you know, what they used to call UFOs. And it turns out that the United States Air Force is really concerned about these UAPs. And so
You know, partly I was a little bit offended that the Air Force was getting into my lane. Um uh, you know, leave the science fiction to me. But uh no, I mean it's it's really it's this crazy intersection between these these two worlds.
In what way did they find your insights useful, do you think?
Aaron Powell Well I think being able to explore sort of the human responses, right? Like the technology itself, you can read all about what they are, but part of writing science fiction is being really creative about
how people are gonna interact with it and what the unintended consequences will be. And so, you know, it's I'm just I'm just my hypothesis, but I I feel that that's probably the most useful aspect is they can see like Oh right, like that technology can manipulate people because they care about their families, you know, as opposed to just a a really dry list of of technical capabilities.
¶ The Human Element In Science And Fiction
Are there sci fi tropes that you can't stand?
Um when the robots want to become people. That's the one that always gets me.
No way. Why?
I know, we're awful. Uh I just feel like, yeah, have some respect for yourself, robot. Like go go do you and don't worry about us. Um You know, th that's why you know, I used to be one thing I couldn't stand as a robotics student was um all the Asimov stuff where there were psychologists that were, you know, fixing robots through conversation. And you know what? Asimov had the last laugh, right? Because when we finally do get, you know, the near human um 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 that's one for you, Asimov.
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?
Well, I've never met a scientist who wasn't inspired by science fiction. Um And I mean, me personally, I will choose my m my science fictional elements based on, you know, the theme I'm trying to push or or the the emotion that I'm trying to elicit. Because at the end of the day, Uh media, you know, it's human. Uh science fiction has always, I feel like, got to embrace that humanity. Um, 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
uh it's the it's humanity that gives any of this stuff importance, right? And so without that context, uh it's meaningless. And and so that's really, you know, that's really I feel like the only burden that that you carry is to is to um respect that human element in your science fiction.
You know, I would argue that's the same for science, Daniel, that the humanity is what gives it its importance.
I think that's playing itself out really clearly right now with um tech billionaires, right? I mean, there's this notion of doing something because you can. And I think that we're increasingly seeing that Um that that doesn't make a lot of sense. Um and you know, 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, you know, to people.
So uh beyond making money. So I think that academically I I'm super behind science. It's just that whenever it gets loose in a corporate world, sometimes uh people lose sight of what the point of it is.
Well maybe that's your next novel.
Oh, there's a lot of dystopic uh scenarios that can stem from that. So yeah, that's a that is fertile territory.
Daniel H. Wilson is a sci-fi writer and his latest book. Hole in the Sky is SciFry'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 dot com slash book club to join our community. Daniel, thanks for chatting today.
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
This episode was produced by Rasha Ariti. 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 8774SyFry, 8774SyFry. We listen to every single message and we love it. Thanks for listening. I'm Florida.
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