The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: Wayfarers, Book 1 characters

Appears from the start

A young Martian woman who hires on as the Wayfarer's first certified clerk, hired to sort out years of neglected permits and paperwork. She has a good education, family money she no longer touches, no practical spacing experience, and a newly purchased identity file. Eager to be useful and anxious to be liked, she throws herself into learning the ship's routines, its languages, and the etiquette of the species the crew deals with, and she never talks about the family she left behind on Mars.

First appears in chapter 2

Captain and owner of the Wayfarer, a human born in the Exodan Fleet. He built the ship's business slowly and legally, keeps a deliberately mixed crew, and refuses to arm his vessel or take work that would require it. Careful, conciliatory, and quietly ambitious for his crew rather than for himself, he spends most of his energy keeping seven very different people functioning in a small space.

First appears in chapter 3

The Wayfarer's pilot, an Aandrisk: a feathered, warm-blooded reptilian species whose social life runs on physical contact and on three overlapping kinds of family. Affectionate, blunt, and openly baffled by human reserve about touch, she has flown with Ashby for years and treats the crew as the family she chose. She is the one sent to collect new arrivals and to smooth over first meetings.

First appears in chapter 3

The ship's cook and medic, a Grum: a large, many-limbed being whose real name no other species can pronounce, so the crew uses his jobs instead. He grows and cooks the ship's food with obvious delight, doubles as its doctor, and speaks with several voices at once. Gentle and observant, he rarely volunteers anything about the history of his species, which is small in number and getting smaller.

First appears in chapter 2

The Wayfarer's mech tech, a human of relentless energy who sings while she works, invents her own vocabulary, and keeps the ship's hardware running on improvisation and affection. She shares a workshop, a hobby room, and a deep friendship with Jenks, and she welcomes newcomers by adopting them outright.

First appears in chapter 2

The ship's comp tech, a human with dwarfism who was born to a mother whose beliefs ruled out corrective gene work and who now declines it on his own terms. He maintains the ship's AI hardware, keeps a collection of antique tech, and is in love with Lovey, the ship's AI, an attachment he keeps quiet because relationships with AIs are illegal to formalise and widely treated as a joke.

Also known as Lovelace

First appears in chapter 2

The Wayfarer's artificial intelligence, who runs the ship's systems and is present everywhere aboard at once, through every camera, speaker, and sensor. Curious, funny, and attached to the crew, she is closest to Jenks; the two of them treat their relationship as real, whatever the law says about it.

First appears in chapter 2

The ship's algaeist, a human who tends the vats of algae that fuel the Wayfarer. Precise, humourless, and openly contemptuous of small talk and of anyone he considers unqualified, he is disliked by most of the crew and appears to have arranged his life that way on purpose.

First appears in chapter 3

The Wayfarer's Navigator, a Sianat Pair. Sianat navigators are deliberately infected in childhood with a virus that rebuilds the brain so it can perceive the layered structure of space a tunnelling ship must cross, and they speak of themselves in the plural because they consider host and virus one being. Ohan keeps to a darkened room, refuses food and company beyond what the work requires, and observes the doctrine that keeps their kind apart from everyone else.

First appears in chapter 7

An Aeluon cargo captain who runs supply routes through contested space and meets Ashby when their courses allow. Aeluons are silver-skinned and speak partly through colour, and they take a poor view of attachments outside their own species, so she and Ashby keep the nature of their relationship between themselves.

First appears in chapter 9

A human tech on the market moon of Port Coriol who deals in salvaged and secondhand hardware and can source things that are not strictly legal. Loud, capable, and generous with people she likes, she has known the Wayfarer's crew for years and does business with Jenks in particular.

First appears in chapter 9

A quiet human artist who lives and works with Pepper on Port Coriol. He stammers, keeps out of negotiations, and is entirely at ease in her company.