Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

Simon & Schuster, 2015

Underneath the unusual setting in Nnedi Okorafor's new novel Lagoon – that is, Nigeria – there's a startlingly standard first-contact sci-fi novel. A disparate trio of humans – a marine biologist named Adaora, a musician named Anthony, and a conflicted soldier named Agu - in Lagos encounter a magisterial, shape-shifting alien whose vessel has come down in the nearby ocean. This alien, who takes the shape of a beautiful woman and is given the name Ayodele, calmly informs the humans who've met her that her people “like” the spot they've chosen – it's one of the best-mannered alien invasions in recent sci-fi – and Okorafor sets about immediately exploiting the differences inherent in such a thing happening in Nigeria rather than the customary Western depots. Ayodele herself is imperturbable about the intervention of her people:

“You have named me Ayodele. You people will call me an alien because I am from space, your outer heavens, beyond. I am what you all call an ambassador, the first to come and communicate with you people. I was sent. We landed in your waters and have been communicating with other people there and they've been good to us.”

But although Adaora immediately begins to conduct rudimentary scientific tests on Ayodele in an attempt to understand her incredible shape-shifting abilities, the more general reaction is typified by the “smooth-talking predator” Father Oke, who no sooner meets Ayodele than he's suggesting she's a witch in need of either salvation or destruction – and perhaps like some of Okorafor's readers, he's at first skeptical about the whole question of location:

Father Oke smiled shakily, trying to look serene and pious when he felt like tearing out of that basement screaming. He didn't know if he believed in aliens or not. He'd never considered the question. If there were aliens, they certainly wouldn't come to Nigeria. Or maybe they would.

His reaction is amplified considerably by Adaora's nervous, vindictive accountant husband Chris, who's terrified and malicious about Adaora herself, let alone any extraterrestrial guests:

Chris shut his eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the warm night air. Dirty Lagos air. So different from the air he'd breathed during his three-year stay in Germany for his MBA. He coughed. Since he'd begun fasting, he had to admit, he just hadn't felt right. He knew it was the witchcraft his wife had worked on him rebelling against his cleansing efforts. He had to keep fasting. Eventually it would all get better, he'd be free of her grasp and he'd be back in control of his life and his wife. Maybe.

“Lagos is energy,” we're told. “It never stops.” And something of that energy filters through Lagoon and imparts to it the relatively small amount of energy it has. The aliens themselves are very mild variations on the standard snooty-angelic model, and the trio of humans making first contact are likewise standard issue (and the secondary Lagos characters like Father Oke are little more than commedia dell'arte buffoons), and the novel's prose is unexceptional (“the icing on the cake,” “piercing eyes,” “breathing sighs of relief,” and other cliches show up on virtually every page, and when characters breathe lines like “Water is life,” they – or perhaps Okorafor – pause for a fraction of a moment as if in the presence of profundity). By the time Lagoon winds its way to its fairly predictable conclusion, many of Okorafor's readers will be wondering why on Earth Ayodele and her people didn't fetch up someplace more interesting.