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
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.”
—Clifford Irving (b. 1930)
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which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
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“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)