Waking Gods characters

Appears from the start

A young girl living in Puerto Rico who keeps a journal. She is bright, watchful and given to blunt observations about the adults around her, and she has dreams and impressions she cannot account for, which her family treats as an overactive imagination. She is the first voice in the book, and nothing in her life appears to connect her to the giant machine the world has been watching for a decade.

First appears in chapter 3

A BBC reporter in London who is on air when an enormous figure appears overnight in the middle of the city, standing motionless in a park and answering nothing. His broadcasts are the public record of the standoff as it develops, and he reports it from close range while the authorities are still deciding what it is.

First appears in chapter 4

Head of the science division of the Earth Defense Corps, the international body that now operates Themis, and the physicist who has understood the machine better than anyone since she fell into its hand as a child. She is also, by her own account, a copy: the Rose Franklin who ran the original project died, and this one appeared afterwards carrying her memories and no explanation for herself. She works constantly, partly because the work is urgent and partly because it is easier than the question of what she is.

First appears in chapter 5

A brigadier general and the commanding officer of the Earth Defense Corps. Dry, plainspoken and unimpressed by ceremony, he spends more of his time managing the governments that fund him than the people who work for him. He is protective of his staff, blunt with his superiors, and skeptical of any plan whose first step is to fire something.

First appears in chapter 6

A captain in the Earth Defense Corps and one of Themis's two pilots, a former army helicopter pilot who has spent a decade inside the machine. Direct to the point of rudeness, contemptuous of the public appearances the job now involves, and closer to Vincent Couture than to anyone else, though a decade of the same work in the same confined space has worn at both of them.

First appears in chapter 9

A man interviewed without any stated occupation, who is evidently well informed about the machine, its history and the people around it, and who has access no ordinary official would have. He speaks carefully, volunteers little, and is plainly acting for interests he declines to name.

First appears in chapter 11

Themis's other pilot and the Earth Defense Corps' consultant on the machine's language and controls, the Montreal linguist who first read its script. Sardonic, quick with a joke at the wrong moment, and by now more soldier than academic. He has been with Kara Resnik for years and is handling the accumulated strain of the decade less well than he lets on.

First appears in chapter 22

A security guard at the Earth Defense Corps who once flew with Kara Resnik and followed her into the project. He has stayed near her for years in a post well below what he trained for, and his feelings for her have not changed in that time.

First appears in chapter 25

A lieutenant general commanding Joint Special Operations Command, brought into the crisis as it escalates. He treats the situation as a military problem with a military answer, has little patience for the Earth Defense Corps' insistence on studying before acting, and represents the governments that would prefer the matter settled with weapons.

First appears in chapter 32

The Earth Defense Corps' geneticist, who has spent years on the markers that determine who can pilot Themis. Exacting, driven and socially isolated, with a stammer she dislikes having noticed, she is widely disliked by her colleagues and has never been given the standing she believes her work deserves.