The aliens came to Lagos first, and now, finally, there’s a US edition. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, written as a response to District 9, published in the UK last year, and available stateside from Saga Press as of last week, imagines a world in which aliens arrive in Lagos, Nigeria. As in the best first contact stories, the focus isn’t on the aliens—it’s on what happens to Lagos after they arrive.

This is the story not of a single character or incident, but of a community. The core group of characters, Adaora, Anthony, and Agu, meet under mysterious circumstances: they are drawn into the ocean against their will and returned in the company of Ayodele, the alien ambassador. It’s up to them to take Ayodele to their leader, and to spread the news of the alien invasion. But this isn’t really their book. Okorafor isn’t the first author to reject the rule that character names should never begin with the same letter, a writing class staple if there ever was one, and the effect here goes beyond formalist playfulness to a kind of productive confusion. Yes, it’s easy to get the characters mixed up at first (Adaora is the marine biologist in the unhappy marriage; Anthony is the famous rapper; Agu is the soldier; Ayodele is the godlike extraterrestrial composed of nanoparticles), but it also keeps the focus on the group, not the individuals; the whole, not the parts.

The aliens describe themselves as “agents of change,” and Lagoon deals with the aftermath of their arrival. Like Ayodele, whose shifting frame can rearrange itself into any number of forms, it’s composed of fragments. These fragments offer short, necessarily incomplete glimpses into the lives of city residents from all walks of life, all of them changed forever by the aliens’ presence. There are sex workers and corrupt clergymen, 419 scammers, cross-dressers, politicians and their wives, as well as other creatures: spiders, fish, immortals. Something about the presence of the aliens seems to wake up other supernatural forces that have always existed in Nigeria: new and old gods reveal themselves and take part in Lagos’s peculiar renovation. As in Under the Dome, another first contact novel with an extensive ensemble cast, the scope occasionally limits the possibilities for characterization; if Lagoon’s characters have hidden depths, there’s not much time to learn about them here. But this is the nature of of a city: one only witnesses brief snippets of other people’s stories.

Okorafor is one of the most creative, formally experimental SF/F writers working today, and here she takes plenty of risks. In a surprising turn, the entire book switches into first person in its middle section, as the consciousnesses of different characters blur together. It’s as if the city is a chorus, but a chorus in which everyone speaks with a different voice. A reference to certain Star Wars movies is so over-the-top audacious that it works, deliciously. When supernatural characters begin to show up, and the book veers sharply into fantasy, the effect is exciting, not disorienting. The blending of myth, social commentary, innovative storytelling, satirical bite, and pulp energy is unique, exciting, and very welcome. Reading it is like meeting an entire city, then watching it grow fins and swim away.

Lagoon is available now.