Caliban's War characters

Appears from the start

A four-year-old girl living on Ganymede, the agricultural moon that feeds the outer planets. She has a genetic immune disorder that requires regular treatment and frequent clinic visits, and she is collected from her daycare by her doctor on an ordinary morning.

Appears from the start

Mei's physician on Ganymede, familiar to the children in his care and trusted by their parents, who arrives at her daycare to take her for a scheduled appointment.

Also known as Bobbie

Appears from the start

A gunnery sergeant in the Martian Marine Corps, very tall and heavily built even for a Martian, serving on the tense demilitarized line between the Martian and United Nations garrisons on Ganymede. She is a career soldier who loves the work, trusts her platoon, and has no interest in politics until the day her patrol is destroyed by something that should not exist.

Also known as Jim Holden

First appears in chapter 2

Captain of the Rocinante, working under contract to Fred Johnson and the Outer Planets Alliance, hunting pirates and enforcing order in the Belt. Roughly a year and a half after Eros, the openness that once defined him has hardened: he shoots earlier, tells the public less, and is uneasy about who he is becoming.

First appears in chapter 2

The Rocinante's executive officer and engineer, a Belter whose steadiness holds the crew together and who is the one person willing to tell Holden plainly that he is changing for the worse.

First appears in chapter 2

The Rocinante's mechanic, an Earther with a placid manner and an entirely practical view of violence, who takes his sense of right and wrong from the people he has chosen rather than from any principle of his own.

First appears in chapter 2

The Rocinante's pilot, a former Martian navy flyer with a Mariner Valley drawl, cheerfully talkative and among the best ship handlers alive.

First appears in chapter 2

Head of the Outer Planets Alliance's operation at Tycho Station and the Rocinante's employer, a former UN colonel trying to turn a loose movement into a legitimate government while Earth and Mars look for reasons to treat it as a criminal one.

Also known as Prax

First appears in chapter 3

A botanist on Ganymede specializing in engineered crops for the moon's domes, precise, mild and easily lost in technical detail. He is divorced and shares custody of his daughter Mei, and when the fighting starts he discovers she was taken from her daycare hours earlier by her doctor. Without her medication she will not survive long, and he goes on looking for her after everyone else has stopped.

First appears in chapter 5

A senior official in the United Nations government on Earth, an elderly woman with grandchildren, an indulgent husband and a vocabulary that startles admirals. She has spent a long career reading what people are not saying, and she is certain that the shooting on Ganymede was provoked and that someone inside her own government arranged it.

First appears in chapter 5

Avasarala's superior in the United Nations government, a smooth and effective political operator who shares her hawkishness about Mars and appears to be her closest ally in managing the crisis.

First appears in chapter 12

A wealthy Luna industrialist, father of the Julie Mao who died on Eros, who withdrew from public life after the protomolecule experiment was exposed. Avasarala's investigation keeps returning to his companies as the only private hands with the money, ships and laboratories to have continued that work.

First appears in chapter 18

A United Nations admiral with a hard line on Mars and the Belt, impatient with diplomacy and openly contemptuous of civilian officials who slow the fleet down.

First appears in chapter 20

A Ganymede boy, the son of a family Prax knows, who suffered from the same kind of immune disorder as Mei and was taken to the same clinic before her. His parents were told he had died.

First appears in chapter 45

A researcher on the hybrid program whose capacity for emotional attachment was deliberately removed by a surgical procedure. He discusses experiments performed on children with untroubled professional enthusiasm and cannot understand why anyone objects.