Sleeping Giants characters

Appears from the start

On her eleventh birthday, riding a new bicycle through the woods outside Deadwood, South Dakota, she falls through the ground into a deep square shaft and lands in the open palm of an enormous metal hand, in a chamber whose walls are covered with panels that give off light. Seventeen years later she is a physicist leading the research team that studies the same hand she fell into as a child. Methodical, curious to the point of stubbornness, and more comfortable with a problem than with the people around it, she is the one who keeps asking what the object is for rather than what it is worth.

First appears in chapter 3

An unnamed man who conducts every interview collected in these files and who appears to direct the project from outside any visible chain of command. He has money, information and political leverage far beyond anything his lack of a title would suggest, and he uses all three without explaining himself. Courteous, patient and entirely unsentimental, he treats the people he questions as pieces to be placed, and he answers only the questions he has decided to answer.

First appears in chapter 12

A United States Army helicopter pilot whose aircraft lost its instruments over a remote site near the Turkish border, an incident that draws her into the project. Blunt, impatient with rank and paperwork, dismissive of anything that resembles public relations, and genuinely gifted at the flying itself. She is brought in as the project's pilot and quickly finds that she is being asked to do a great deal more than fly.

First appears in chapter 15

A linguist from Montreal, recruited to work on the symbols carved into the lighted panels found with the buried pieces. Quick, irreverent and inclined to argue with whoever is in the room, he has an unusual gift for finding structure in a script nobody can read. He treats the assignment as an academic puzzle at first and is slower than Rose Franklin to ask what the people paying for the answer intend to do with it.

First appears in chapter 20

A United States Army pilot who flew with Kara Resnik and follows her into the project's orbit. Steady, uncomplicated and loyal, he is plainly attached to her in a way she does not return, and he accepts a role well below what he trained for in order to stay near the work and near her.

First appears in chapter 33

A geneticist brought onto the project to establish why only a small number of people can make the panels respond. Exacting, ambitious and socially awkward, with a stammer she is self-conscious about, she is disliked by much of the team and by Kara Resnik in particular. She is more interested in what her results make possible than in whether anyone is comfortable with them.