Stolen Skies is a 2022 contemporary fantasy novel by Tim Powers. It is the third of a series in which the protagonists are Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine, following Alternate Routes and Forced Perspectives.
Castine, now attached to Naval Intelligence, learns that an off-the-books operation is trying to capture Vickery, who has apparently learned something dangerous about the phenomenon commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects. She goes rogue to warn him, and together they try to figure out what it is he knows that's so important. What they learn is that a recent uptick in UFO-related phenomena is leading up to a climactic event that threatens all life on Earth if it is not prevented.
This novel contains examples of:
- Area 51: Plowman used to work at Area 51. He tells the protagonists that the official explanation is basically accurate and that it was never a home of alien secrets — except that once, coincidentally, a UFO crash did occur there.
- Chekhov's Gun: When Vickery asks to borrow one of Galvan's special cars, she shows him the pride of her fleet and enumerates its many virtues before telling him there's no chance she's letting him borrow it and giving him something less impressive instead. The pride of the fleet does end up coming into play toward the end of the novel, though true to her word Galvan drives it herself.
- Chekhov's Hobby: Vickery has taken up landscape painting, and a technique he uses in his paintings ends up playing a key role at the climax.
- Crop Circles: Crop circles are real (apart from the ones created by the disinformation division of US military intelligence to confuse the issue) and the reason why aliens would bother making such a thing is key to the plot.
- Government Conspiracy: The department of US military intelligence involved in studying UFOs and related phenomena spend at least as much time trying to persuade everyone that the phenomena aren't real, even going so far as to secretly fake sightings and crop circles themselves so they can publicly debunk them later. It doesn't appear to be a case of Hiding the Truth so much as they don't know what the Truth is either and they want to keep everything under wraps until they figure it out.
- The Greys: Plowman says that the common idea of the bald grey aliens is based on a few genuine alien encounters, though that's only the aliens' attempt to mimic human form; they're actually extra-dimensional beings with nothing we'd understand as biology.
- Inscrutable Aliens: The aliens are so alien that it's almost impossible to communicate with them and the protagonists only ever get a tiny vague glimpse of their thought processes and intentions.
- Monochrome Past: Some of the characters are able to see visions of the past, which appear in-universe in sepia tones. Vickery speculates that the visions include infrared light spectra that aren't normally visible to human eyes and which their brains are interpreting as a coppery color.
- More than Three Dimensions: The aliens exist in multiple dimensions, and UFO phenomena are the effects of them dipping into our perceivable universe. One character says it's like ripples in the surface of the pond when something falls in, if the surface was all you could perceive, and another explicitly compares it to the situations in Flatland.
- Starfish Aliens: The aliens exist in multiple dimensions, and have bodies and minds fundamentally different from anything on Earth. The few times a human has interacted with one with any degree of success, it's been when one of the aliens has become trapped within local spacetime and attempted to make some (always incomplete and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to adapt to local conditions.
