For instance, people all have implants that allow them to broadcast their location - or to be tracked by the police and by others, even when they do not want to be. In Thompson’s future Nigeria and future world, computing technologies have been pushed - mostly for reasons of political control - well beyond their actual state today. In any case, Rosewater is set some fifty years in the future (2066, with flashbacks to earlier dates in the mid-21st-century). The fact is, both authors (and many of their characters) are far more cosmopolitan than I am, because they are intimately familiar both with Western (US/UK) society and with societies in Nigeria and elsewhere. Lagoon and Rosewater both expose the provincialism of the very North American, British, and European readers who tend to congratulate themselves on their supposed cosmopolitanism. The underlying state of Nigerian society is simply taken for granted in both novels - which forces the reader (no matter his or her own background) to take it for granted as well. However, both Thompson and Okorafor guard against this tendency by immersing us in the social background, without any special explanations. Of course, there is always the danger that a white anglophone reader from a hegemonic country and culture (i.e., somebody like myself) might find any such futuristic depiction of the developing world to be alluringly “exotic,” if only on account of its unfamiliarity. Both novels go explicitly against the common tendency to set such narratives in big cities of the Global North. The first is Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, equally wonderful, but in an entirely different way. Tade Thompson’s extraordinary new SF novel Rosewater is the second recent book I have read with the premise of extraterrestrials arriving in Nigeria.

WARNING: numerous spoilers, since I cannot really discuss the novel without them

Rosewater thompson