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Lagoon’s Deleted Scene
There’s little point to reading this without first reading my review of Lagoon, and indeed, preferably the novel as well. When you’ve done that, come back and we’ll talk.
Ok, good. In case you ignored my advice, let’s get you up to speed. Lagoon is a novel by Nnedi Okorafor, set in the Nigerian city of Lagos, a chaotic, lively, growing, thriving, living city. The entire novel takes place in Lagos or its surrounds, with one exception – and even that is tied immediately and directly into Lagos. It’s also a first contact novel; the aliens come not to New York, not to London, not to DC or LA or Paris or any of the other standards, but to Lagos. That shift from the Western, colonialist world to the developing but still poor economy of Nigeria is a fascinating one, especially in the ways that the aliens reflect the pushback against the standard approach to charity and foreign aid; external forces creating the cirumstances for internal change.
There’s one thing which would have changed that singular focus on Nigeria; the deleted scene Okorafor chose to include at the end of Lagoon, showing African-American college kids reacting to the various reportage and social media footage of the events of the novel. Suddenly, reading that, the whole novel changes; a visible spaceship appears off the coast of Nigeria, and the (governmental/official/international) reaction appears to barely extend beyond the people of Lagos? That focus is, when highlighted, impossible and unbelievable; but, as in Western-set first contact novels, by ignoring the rest of the world, we forget that it even exists. It allows Lagos to become the world, whilst remaining Lagos; but as soon as you give us a secondary location, we have to wonder what’s happening there – and everywhere else. It breaks the hyperfocused world created by the author, and creates problems for the reader.
I commented on Twitter that the scene would have damaged the sense of the novel as “African”, if it had been included, and Nnedi Okorafor replied:
So, what did I get wrong? Simply put, this is no more an African novel than a first contact novel set in New York is a ‘Western’ novel; the paradigm is narrower than that. Lagos, for the reader, comes to stand in for both the world and Africa. Okorafor narrows everything down for the reader by focusing in closer without ever looking at a broader world; Lagos is the only place in the world, it’s the place the aliens have chosen, and Okorafor deploys both that fact and the character of Lagos to perfection. My mistake was to call the novel an African novel; instead, it is Nigerian, the way NYC-set first-contact novels are American novels. Putting in characters from outside the closed world of Lagos makes it a global novel, the same way putting a character in Lagos into a novel set in NYC would make the novel global and raise questions about the America-only response.
So who is African? As a white British blogger, I don’t have a voice in that conversation – or rather, I shouldn’t have, and won’t try to engage in it. But who should appear in Lagoon? That question I will answer; and the answer is, characters in Nigeria. And that’s why I’m glad that deleted scene was indeed deleted.
GUEST POST: Worldbuilding by Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison
Yesterday, I wrote about the fantastic Goblin Emperor, the latest book from Sarah Monette under the nom de plume Katherine Addison; as you’ll have gathered, I absolutely adored the book. However, it struck me how very different the world of the novel was from any of her other work that I have read – the Iskryne books coauthored with Elizabeth Bear, her previous fantasy series The Doctrine of Labyrinths, or her linked series of Lovecraftian homages, the Booth stories. So I asked her how she built such very different worlds… and she very kindly agreed to write about exactly that for me! Below, the fantastic Sarah Monette, with a fascinating essay on Worldbuilding!
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I world-build like a magpie. Or a bower bird. Find a shiny thing, take it back, incorporate it into the nest. Look for shiny things everywhere.
In the Doctrine of Labyrinths books, I didn’t do much camouflaging, throwing in the Napoleonic revolutionary calendar unchanged and stealing the names of mythical female monsters and lost Shakespeare plays. I was in graduate school for most of the writing of the quartet, and I threw in bits and pieces from all of my classes: the town of Yehergod got its name because I was taking an Old English class. Cerberus Cresset got his name from an English Civil War memoir, in which Lucy Hutchinson bitterly describes her imprisoned husband’s guard as “that Cerberus, Cresset.” The theater sub-plot in The Mirador was a chance to use what I learned from my theater history class about Renaissance and Restoration and Victorian theater. All the Greek and Latin comes from my undergraduate major in Classics. The bog bodies in Corambis are lifted from P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People. Districts of Melusine get their names from Babylonian epics and Spenser’s Fairie Queene and words that I found and loved the sound of when I combined them, like Shatterglass. I could go on indefinitely, but my point is that I was world-building purely for the love of language and esoterica and geeky in-jokes in the Doctrine books, and if that’s self-indulgent, well . . . I’m not sorry.
Kyle Murchison Booth’s world is rather different, since it’s only a fraction off from ours. The world itself is a pastiche/collage of H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James, and the world-building primarily takes place through texts, like Wells-Burton’s Demonologica in “Elegy for a Demon Lover,” the works of Carolus Albinus in “White Charles,” and The Book of Whispers, both the genuine (in “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox”) and the forgery (in a novella I’m still working on). One of the reasons I love writing Booth stories is that they let me make up books and authors and bits of literary history, and because books are the way Booth interacts with the world, the world-building is always a reaffirmation of character.
World-building in The Goblin Emperor was rather different because–obviously–I’d cut myself off from all my usual strategies. That wasn’t by design, but I don’t think it was a bad thing. I still world-build through words. Maia, Setheris, Edonomee, The Wisdom of Choharo: I built the world in a spiral out from those words and what those words told me about characters and places. And airships.
I can’t explain how words bring character and place and history with them, how Edonomee was a hunting lodge in the marshes, shabby and isolated, as soon as I’d figured out how to spell it, or Ezho was always a gold rush town (even though we never see it), rich and brawling and brash and young. It’s just how my creativity works, and I don’t get to argue with it any more than I get to understand it.
But the process of world-building is actually easy to explain, because the process is just thinking through the consequences. Every choice you make in building a world leads to other choices. If you have an emperor, he must have a government. How does that government work? If there’s a parliament, how are the members chosen? How much does the emperor actually get to do? He must have a palace. Who built it? When? Is it only the emperor’s residence, or is it also the seat of government? Same goes for geography. Is point A (Edonomee) east or west of point B (the Untheileneise Court)? How far? There’s a river in the way. What’s its name? Is there traffic on it? Are there bridges?
Come to find out, there aren’t bridges, and that turned out to be not just world-building, but an enormous part of the story.
Some writers have to make all those choices before they can start writing. Some prefer to. It’s never worked for me, because part of what makes me write is the part where I get to discover things. E. L. Doctorow describes writing as being like “driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” and that’s pretty accurate as far as I’m concerned. I world-build (and character-build and plot-build) as I go, only looking far enough ahead, generally, to see the next obstacle.
It hasn’t stopped being fun yet, either.
Intellectus Speculativus 