Lagoon by Nnedi OkoraforSaga Press, 2015 (Originally Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)

In the prologue of Lagoon, we see a swordfish swimming through the waters off Lagos, where something extraordinary is happening. The fish hears the loudest sound she’s ever heard, and then looks down and sees “something large and glowing” in the water: it’s a giant spaceship (5). “When a golden blob ascends to meet her, she doesn’t move to meet it. But she doesn’t flee either” (6). And then there’s this: “When it communicates with her, asking question after question, she hesitates. It doesn’t take long for her apprehension to shift to delight. What good questions it asks. She tells it exactly what she wants” (ibid.). It’s a great start to a great book: it’s pleasing to read a first-contact story where the aliens are interested in everything around them, not just people.

Of course, the aliens do make contact with people shortly thereafter. A marine biologist named Adaora, a soldier named Agu, and a Ghanaian rapper named Anthony all find themselves on Bar Beach, right where the ship is, the night the aliens appear. Adaora’s been fighting with her husband, Agu fought with his commander to try to stop the commander from raping a woman, and Anthony just needed some fresh air after his show. Or that’s why they would say they ended up where they did, but it becomes clear that the aliens brought them together, and that they want help making a nonviolent entry into human/Lagosian/Nigerian society. When Adaora and Agu and Anthony leave the beach, they’re not alone: one of the aliens, who’s taken the form of a Nigerian-looking woman and says they can call her Ayodele, is with them. “We are change,” Ayodele explains: the aliens can change their own forms, but they change what’s around them, too (39).

Not surprisingly, when word gets out that aliens have landed in Lagos, things get a bit crazy. Adaora’s husband’s priest sees the chance to convert an extraterrestrial to Christianity as a great publicity opportunity; the LGBTQ group at the university sees a chance to gain greater acceptance; others see the chance to maybe get rich. Others are afraid, and just want the aliens dead or gone, even though Ayodele assures them that her people come with good intentions: “We are guests who wish to become citizens…here” she says, and later explains that her people have an environmental message/mission, too (110).

I like how much there is going on in this book, how it’s a fast-paced adventure that also takes detours into side plots and explorations of figures/beliefs from Nigerian myth and folklore, how it tells snippets of many stories—the story of someone in an Internet café when the aliens arrive, the story of a bat, the story of a road. It’s smart and funny and moving and exactly what I was in the mood for, and I will definitely be reading more by Nnedi Okorafor.