Characters
Humans
Robert Oneagle - Playboy son of the Planetary Coordinator, who enters into a complicated interspecies relationship with the Tymbrimi teenager Athaclena as well as being one of two free humans left alive and uncaptured on the surface of Garth. he undergoes a tremendous physical and mental change over the course of the book as the invasion occurs and he becomes the last free human of garth.
Megan Oneagle - Planetary coordinator of Garth, who finds herself powerless in an undersea redoubt after the Gubru arrive, with all plans for organized resistance foiled by the Gubru's gas attack.
Neo-Chimpanzees
Fiben Bolger - A chimp with the commission in the planetary militia. Friend of Robert Oneagle. Plays a large role in the resistance effort.
Sylvie - Female chimp who initially collaborates with the invaders.
Gailet Jones - Female chimp, graduate student at the planetary university. Leads a branch of the resistance after invasion.
Max -
"Irongrip" a probie chen outcast -
Galactics (Friendly)
Athaclena - Tymbrimi
Uthacalthing - Tymbrimi. The tymbrimi are humanoid in shape and anatomy. They have two features that make them distinct among the Galactics: their adaptation hormones and their corona. The corona is a set of tentacular threads emitting from the head upward, it is a probability organ fitted to construct emotional glyphs that convey a specific emotion. These glyphs then can take on a mind of their own, in a sense, as certain ones are used for everything from scouting other creatures in the dark to trying to implant a thought in someone else's mind. The adaptation hormones are a special ability they have; under physical stress, the body releases a flood of hormones to the parts of the body, causing the stress and alters them. It can make skin thicker, nails harder and longer, widen the nostrils for better air intake, change the placements of nerve endings and body part placements, etc. Also, the tymbrimi feature a rather unusual quality among galactics; they are tricksters. They play practical jokes on each other as a part of their civilization, and have an extraordinary sense of humor, much like humans but 100-fold stronger.
Kault - Thennanin ambassador in Garth.
Galactics (Unfriendly)
Gubru - A race of avian (birdlike) creatures governed by the Triumvirate, a selected 3 officials representing the army, church, and economy of their race. The Triumvirate are all un-sexed until they reach the mating consensus, meaning that all three officials need to reach complete agreement on all three subjects before one of them is able to become a female or queen.
Read more about this topic: The Uplift War
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“The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga—stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)