Record of a Spaceborn Few characters

First appears in chapter 2

An archivist of the Asteria, one of the Exodan Fleet's ships. She keeps the Fleet's records, officiates at its naming ceremonies and funerals, and is the person outsiders are sent to when they want Exodan life explained. Elderly, patient, and quietly proud of a society she has never had to justify before, she is preparing to host a visiting scholar from another species.

First appears in chapter 8

Isabel's wife of many decades, sharp-tongued and unsentimental, who has spent her working life on the Fleet's mechanical systems. Her body is failing her in ways she refuses to be delicate about, and she is the person Isabel argues her ideas out with.

First appears in chapter 8

A Harmagian academic who has come to the Exodan Fleet to study it from the inside and write about it for readers who have never taken humans seriously. Harmagians are large, tentacled, and were once the Commons' dominant colonial power; she travels in a mobility cart and is unfailingly courteous, curious, and frank about how strange she finds the Fleet's shared, moneyless way of living.

First appears in chapter 3

A woman who works in a cargo bay sorting and processing salvage, raising a young daughter and a toddler son while her husband works off-fleet on a long contract. Steady and practical, she is the sort of person who absorbs other people's crises, and she is beginning to notice that both her job and her certainty about the ships are less solid than they were. She is the sister of a tunnelling ship's captain who works out in the Commons.

First appears in chapter 6

Tessa's young daughter, bright and stubborn, who has become badly frightened of the hull: of breaches, of vacuum, and of the fact that the only thing between her family and space is old metal that has failed before.

First appears in chapter 12

Tessa's husband, away from the Fleet on a long work contract and present mostly through calls home. His absence, and the money and options his work represents, are part of what makes the family's future an open question.

First appears in chapter 4

A sixteen-year-old on the Asteria, restless and unimpressed, expected to pick a trade and start an apprenticeship and unable to imagine wanting any of them. He believes his real life is somewhere off the Fleet, on a planet, and spends his time avoiding the question with his friend Ras.

First appears in chapter 10

Kip's friend, louder and more confident than he is, and the source of most of the small illicit schemes the two of them attempt. He is comfortable in the Fleet in a way Kip is not.

First appears in chapter 5

A young man born planetside to a family of Exodan descent, who has sold what he had and travelled to the Fleet hoping to be taken in by the culture his ancestors left. He arrives with no relatives, no contacts, and none of the skills the ships need, and he discovers that Exodan work is allocated through family and neighbourhood rather than hired. Earnest and increasingly desperate to be useful.

First appears in chapter 6

A caretaker: one of the people who receive the Fleet's dead, prepare the bodies, and compost them so that they feed the farms the living eat from. The work is central to Exodan belief and its practitioners are revered in the abstract and kept socially at arm's length in person, which she feels sharply. Competent, self-contained, and increasingly unwilling to be treated as a function rather than a person.

First appears in chapter 24

A man who works as a professional companion, providing physical and emotional intimacy as a recognised Fleet trade. Easy-going and unbothered by what other people find awkward, he is one of the few who treats Eyas as ordinary company rather than as the person who handles corpses.