I thought this book was great, and I love any opportunity to experience fantasy or sci-fi from outside of a white, Euro-centric lens because until fairly recently I’ve not really known where to look for them. Lagoon is not a long book, but relative to its length, it is packed to overflowing with symbolism, evocative language, and valuable lessons about the ways we react to people who are different than us.Ĥ.8 out of 5 items of rating (I knoI don’t even care. It also reminds me of Butler’s Wild Seed a bit in the ways that Okorafor has intermingled human and animal in Ayodele (humanoid to monkey), and Adaora’s brief transformation from human to mermaid, but also in the way that we are able to briefly see the world as the altered swordfish. It is sort of reminiscent of Octavia Butler to me (which I consider extremely high praise, and hope that you do too) in the way that she combines elements of hard sci-fi (aliens, spacecrafts, alien technology) with elements of African mythos and more traditionally fantasy-oriented things like magic.

When a strange meteorite crashes into the nearby ocean, the destinies of the three of them become united. She lives in Chicago, where she is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

A series of circumstances brings three strangers living in Lagos, Nigeria, to meet: the marine biologist Adaora, the rapper Anthony and the soldier Agu. Nnedi Okorafor is the author of numerous novels and short stories, including Zahrah the Windseeker, which won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature, and Who Fears Death, winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. I love the more feminist approach to science fiction that Okorafor has settled upon in this story. The novel Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor was published for the first time in 2014.

Lagoon nnedi okorafor characters