Stories of Your Life and Others characters

Appears from the start

A miner from Elam who joins the long-established community living on the immense Tower of Babylon. Practical, curious, and accustomed to working stone, he is part of the expedition sent beyond the sun and stars to break through the vault of heaven.

First appears in chapter 2

A gifted mathematician whose confidence in her life's work collapses after she develops a proof that exposes a contradiction at the foundations of arithmetic. Her intellectual crisis has already become a personal emergency when the story opens.

First appears in chapter 2

Renée's husband, who tries to support her after her suicide attempt. He is not a mathematician, and the effort to understand the destruction of her certainty forces him to examine the less rational foundations of their marriage.

First appears in chapter 3

A man recovering from brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation. An experimental drug restores far more than his former abilities, rapidly sharpening his memory, perception, and capacity to learn until the doctors studying him can no longer follow his progress.

First appears in chapter 4

A linguist recruited by the military when alien spacecraft appear around Earth. She approaches the visitors' language through patient fieldwork, separating their speech and writing into patterns while narrating moments from the life of the daughter she will have.

First appears in chapter 4

A physicist paired with Louise on the effort to communicate with the alien visitors. He concentrates on their scientific concepts while Louise studies their language, and their easy professional partnership gradually becomes personal.

First appears in chapter 4

The Army officer who brings Louise into the alien-contact project. Focused on security and practical results, he must balance the linguists' need for open-ended exchange against the government's fear of revealing too much.

First appears in chapter 4

Louise's daughter, addressed throughout the account of the alien encounter. Louise presents scattered scenes from the girl's childhood and adulthood rather than telling her life in ordinary chronological order.

First appears in chapter 6

A young nomenclator in a version of Victorian England where carefully devised names can animate clay figures. His talent for discovering effective names draws him from a childhood fascination with automata into industrial and biological research.

First appears in chapter 7

A widower in a world where angelic visitations, miracles, Heaven, and Hell are observable facts. After his devout wife is killed during a visitation and received into Heaven, he longs to join her but cannot manufacture the love of God required for salvation.

First appears in chapter 7

Neil's wife, whose religious faith is much stronger than his. Her death as collateral damage during an angel's appearance leaves Neil grieving in a universe where he knows exactly where she has gone and why he may never follow.

First appears in chapter 8

A college student who has had calliagnosia, an inability to register facial beauty, since childhood. She supports a campus proposal encouraging the condition because she believes appearance should not distort social judgment, then agrees to experience the alternative herself.