It is funny, but it also says a lot about how extremely narrow the focus of SF stories and popular culture is when the idea of aliens on Earth is easier to accept than that they would land anywhere but in USA. This novel was birthed from my anger at District 9, but it quickly became something else entirely.' While any overt references to the movie are, as far as I can tell, missing from the finished story, Okorafor provides a telling as well as amusing commentary on how western-centric most science fiction (as well as popular culture at large) is when more than one character bewilderedly asks whether the aliens are lost and if they weren't supposed to end up in New York instead. In her acknowledgments, Okorafor thanks the 2009 science fiction movie District 9 'for both intriguing and pissing me off so much that I started daydreaming about what aliens would do in Nigeria. Regardless what happens, nothing will ever be the same again.

Lagos is already in a state of great upheaval and the presence of the alien guests, once the fact leaks out, does not help matters. The three of them are weighted down by their own personal problems, but those have to be laid aside as they are pulled under by a tidal wave and spat back out together with an extra-terrestrial being named Ayodele. Adoara, a marine biologist, Anthony, a famous rapper, and Agu, a soldier who's gotten into trouble for not condoning a superior sexually assaulting a civilian, all met on Lagos' Bar Beach when the aliens arrive on earth.

Lagoon nnedi okorafor characters