Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, retellings, science fiction, science fiction horror, thriller
Pages: 288
Published by Doubleday on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A gripping sci-fi thriller—and Native American First Contact story—from the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson, who is a Cherokee Nation citizen and works as a threat forecaster for NASA.
Heliopause is a real place—the very outer edge of our solar system where the sun's solar winds are no longer strong enough to keep debris and intrusions from bombarding our system. It is the farthest edge of our protected boundary (it was recently crossed by Voyager), and the line beyond which space experts look for extraterrestrial presences. This is where Daniel Wilson's fascinating novel begins. Weaving together the story of Jim, a down-on-his-luck absentee father in the Osage territory of Oklahoma, and his daughter, Tawny, with those of a NASA engineer, a misfit anonymous genius who lives in military isolation analyzing a secret incoming "Pattern," and a CIA investigator tasked with tracking unexplained encounters, Heliopause explores a Native American first contact that pulls all five characters into something never before seen or imagined.
My Review:
Nearly 50 years ago, humanity – or at least NASA – sent not just one but two ‘hellos’ out into the universe in the form of unmanned spacecraft, specifically Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They are both still out there, and still sending back data. So far, they are the only man-made objects to pass through the heliosphere, the boundary between our own Solar System and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. They have, literally, truly and in real life, ‘gone where no man (-made object) has gone before.’
And if Voyager’s mission sounds familiar, that quote is even more apt, as the misunderstood enemy in the first Star Trek movie (sometimes referred to as Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture, was a later, fictional, Voyager probe.
So the idea that kicks off Hole in the Sky isn’t all that far-fetched. Nor is the idea that objects from outside our Solar System might pass through, as that has already happened. The first confirmed interstellar object to pass through our solar system, Oumuamua, is cited in the story. There have been two others, Borisov and ATLAS. So again, it’s plausible to combine the two ideas, that something might come here from outside the heliopause, and that it might be a bit more intelligent than just a rock.
Or in the case of this story, a lot more intelligent – or at least programmable. (Then again, it might be like the probe in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – AKA the one with the whales) All of the above would normally be a digression, but it’s not. The scientific – and the science fictional – elements are the ones that got me into this story, BECAUSE it starts on the edge of the possible and the familiar.
Then it branches out. Or puts down roots. Or both. Definitely both. Even as it loops in what feels like bits of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I wasn’t expecting at all.
Like that classic movie, the story of Hole in the Sky is told from multiple viewpoints, in the book all in the first person. And it needs those viewpoints, because a LOT is happening all at once in some rather disparate places.
There’s a NASA scientist who feels called by whatever is heading our way. Or at least that’s what she believes. There’s a CIA analyst who has been communicating with it for years, without knowing who or what it is, only that it occasionally predicts the future. It doesn’t do it often, but when it does it’s ALWAYS right. Of course, there’s a military component to all this, because it’s headed our way, it might be an enemy, and there’s always someone willing to shoot first and ask questions later.
And then there’s Jim Hardgray and his daughter Tawny, living on the land that their people have called home since the Cherokee were forced from their lands in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to Oklahoma in what would be known as “The Trail of Tears” in the 1830s. What his people found in Oklahoma were the Spiro Mounds, built by the ancestors of the ancestors at a time so long ago that it has passed into myth.
Myths that seem to be coming back to life all around them, even though – or perhaps especially because – the mounds are ground zero for first contact with the interstellar whatever-it-is and every single person and/or agency who is rushing to Oklahoma to meet it, greet it, or bomb it out of existence.
Escape Rating B: Hole in the Sky turned out to be, well, a LOT. Both a lot of different elements and a lot of viewpoints. Each and every one of both were fascinating, but it didn’t quite gel into a whole. Maybe two or three wholes, with about the same number of (plot) holes. And because of all of those lots, it’s a hard book to pin down as well as put down.
Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely and absolutely science fiction, but there’s also plenty of crossover with fantasy in the retellings and re-interpretations of Native American mythology, AND there’s quite a bit of horror along for the SFnal ride.
Also, while I got caught up in the multiple points of view and recognized early on that the story needs almost all of them, some of the narrators of those viewpoints were not necessarily reliable or possibly even sane, and transitions were a bit abrupt which left me scrambling to see when the story had shifted – as it often did. The chapters are fast, short and the frequent turnovers felt a bit choppy at points – particularly as a couple of the narrators got a bit, well, chopped up in the head.
All of that being said, the story is one hell of a ride, and all the better for the sense that, even if this hasn’t happened yet, that this is just how the people in those sorts of positions will react – for good and ill. As humans do.
I felt like I didn’t know nearly enough about the Native American myths and legends that were at the heart of the story. The way that Jim Hardgray explained as much as possible to his daughter in the time that he had worked well, and gave me enough to enjoy the story, but also made me wish there were more.
There were also a lot of books that this reminded me of, particularly Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove, When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, and Connie Willis’ The Road to Roswell, along with the previously mentioned Star Trek movies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But those books played their piece of the alien invasion/end of the world/buried alien artifact discovery aspects off (mostly) for laughs even if the movies mostly didn’t.
Hole in the Sky doesn’t play things for laughs at all, even though it’s dealing with a lot of the same scenarios. (Not that some of the observations of humans, bureaucracy, military reactions AND political shenanigans don’t have a bit of gallows humor attached, because they would and do.) But taking this ‘what if?’ scenario seriously does leave the reader pondering a whole lot more when they turn the last page – if not exactly comfortable with the directions of those ponderings.
