Minor Fictional Human Characters in the Colonization Trilogy

This article is for minor human ''characters in the Colonization trilogy. For the list containing the non-human characters, see'' Minor Fictional Non-Human Characters in Worldwar

This article lists the various minor fictional human characters who appear in the Colonization trilogy, a subseries of the overall Worldwar franchise. These characters are identified by name, but play at best a peripheral role in the series. Most were simply mentioned or had a very brief, unimportant speaking role that did not impact the plot, and never appeared again.

Aboriginal Hunter
(Second Contact)

In 1962, an Australian Aboriginal hunter made the mistake of hunting kangaroos too close to a newly created city of The Race during Fleetlord Atvar's visit there. Observing the hunter in action, Atvar demanded on a whim to meet with the man. While the hunter proved elusive at first, he was eventually caught and brought before Atvar. The Fleetlord attempted conversation with him, but the man refused to answer, swearing at him in both his own language and English. After a few fruitless attempts, Atvar ordered his release, and gave the man a replacement knife for the one he lost when taken into custody.

Ludwig Bieberback
(Down to Earth)

Ludwig Bieberback was the German ambassador to the Race in the early 1960s. In 1964, he met with Fleetlord Atvar to express his country's anger at the Race's scrutiny of Germany. As the Race had become aware of the German military buildup along the border with Poland, Atvar warned Bieberback that any attack on Poland would be met with force. While Bieberback denied any such planned attack, he did reassert Germany's right to defend itself. The meeting quickly bogged down into a series of mutual threats, and Bieberback took his leave.

Atvar generally preferred Ambassador Bieberback to his predecessor, Joachim von Ribbentrop; Bieberback seemed to understand the world he lived in, and he could speak the Race's language.

Liz Brock
(Aftershocks)

Liz Brock (d 1965) was the Lewis and Clark 's leading expert in electrolyzing ice found in the asteroid belt to produce oxygen and hydrogen which could be used for fuel and air supply aboard the vessel. She was diagnosed with liver cancer about which her crew could do nothing to help her except easing her pain and soon died in 1965.

Casimir (Laborer)
(SC, A)

Casimir was a Polish laborer who headed a work-gang that was instrumental in building a landing area for shuttlecraft for Nesseref. This was hampered by Casimir's lack of proper skills in the Race's language.

Michel Casson
(A)

Michel Casson chaired a department at the University of Tours. He first joined their faculty shortly after recovering from his wound at the Battle of Verdun. He was extremely doubtful of Monique Dutourd, the professor of Roman history whom he'd been forced to hire by Senior Researcher Felless.

Eddie
(SC)

Eddie was a pitcher in a soft-ball league in 1962. He and Major Sam Yeager were teammates. After a game one day, the young pitcher asked what Yeager thought would happen when the Race's Colonization Fleet arrived. Yeager stated that humanity would be doing its best to make sure it wasn't the bloodiest day in Earth's history.

Reverend Fleischer
(A)

Reverend Fleischer was a Protestant clergyman in Los Angeles, California. He officiated at the wedding of Jonathan Yeager and Karen Culpepper in 1966.

Frederick
(DtE)

Frederick (d. 1965) was a ginger-smuggler in Cape Town, South Africa. He was a black man who had benefitted from the Race's abolition of color-based discrimination in the 1940s. Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers joined him, against Auerbach's better judgment, to sell their illegal wares to Gorppet, an addicted infantrymale of the Race, in exchange for universally-negotiable gold. During the rendezvous in a public park at night, they were set upon by Race police, and a firefight erupted. Frederick attempted to betray his partners in crime but was shot dead by Summers, who escaped with Auerbach and the gold. Gorppet escaped with the ginger. The escape of the main guilty parties was a source of severe frustration for the Race.

Karl
(A)

Karl was a former soldier of the Wehrmacht turned laborer in Nuremberg. Out of hospitality, he gave a moderate amount of banknotes for Johannes Drucker on his journey to Greifswald.

Gustav Kluge
(A)

Gustav Kluge was a German farmer. Following the Race-German War of 1965, people kidnapped from Poland during the fighting were brought to Kluge's farm and forced to labor there. Mordechai Anielewicz found his missing family on this farm, which reminded him of the slave plantation in the movie Gone with the Wind. He rescued his family and barely restrained himself from killing Kluge.

Ku Cheng-Lun
(A)

Ku Cheng-Lun was a resident of Peking, arrested by the People's Liberation Army in 1966, for collaboration with the Race as a clerk during their rule of the city. Having seen the fate of Ma Hai-Teh, he prepared a plausible defense that he had deliberately been a bad clerk, making mistakes on purpose to sabotage efficiency. He showed a written reprimand for slacking-off to Judge Liu Han, who was skeptical of its veracity, but gave him the benefit of the doubt. She sentenced him not to summary death by firing squad, but to hard labor. Both knew that this was a probable death sentence, but Ku was relieved to have gained a new lease on life, however fleeting it would prove to be.

Ma Hai-Teh
(A)

Ma Hai-Teh (d. 1966) worked as a clerk for the Race in Peking. When Peking was taken by the People's Liberation Army, Ma was put before a military tribunal as a collaborator. He confessed that he did clerical work, moving school records from one envelope to another, naively believing that this harmless activity would not merit death in his captors' eyes. However, the PLA regarded any collaboration with the Race as a capital crime, regardless of degree. Judge Liu Han passed his sentence, which was summarily carried out by firing squad.

Pedro Magallanes
(SC)

Pedro Magallanes was an Argentinian student in Professor Shpaaka's class at Russie Medical College, along with Reuven Russie. When Shpaaka led the class in a discussion on the ginger-induced mating craze among the Race, Magallanes asked if the Rabotevs and Hallessi ever exhibited similar behaviour. Shpaaka replied that they didn't, unless an individual had a severe hormonal imbalance akin to the current situation.

Mayor of Los Angeles
(SC)

The Mayor of Los Angeles attended a reception for Liu Han and Liu Mei, the delegates from the Chinese Reds. After Liu Mei made a speech explaining her people's plight, the Mayor made a speech which simply repeated all of her points in so many more words. Major Sam Yeager and Colonel Eli Hollins found the Mayor's speech torturous to listen to, and opined that, if the audience had been prisoners of war, the speech would have violated the Geneva Conventions. When the Mayor finished his speech and left the podium, he got a heartfelt round of applause. He was delighted, as he mistakenly believed that people were cheering the speech itself, rather than the fact that it was over.

Literary comment
As Harry Turtledove often includes trivial Los Angeles minutiae in his stories, it is possible that this is an unnamed historical figure, immediately recognizable only to specialists. It would not appear to be Sam Yorty (OTL LA Mayor 1961-1973), who has elsewhere been described by Turtledove as a very competent, engaging speaker.

Ibrahim Nuqrashi
(DtE)

Ibrahim Nuqrashi was a student at Russie Medical College in Jerusalem. He found that city, as turbulent as it was, to be less violent and chaotic than his native Baghdad.

When the Race made Emperor-worship a prerequisite for continuing at Russie, Nuqrashi dropped out. He said that his father would kill him for not completing his studies, but would torture and kill him if he committed idolatry.

Danny Perez
(SC)

Danny Perez was a radioman of the Lewis and Clark. He was part of the 1963 mission to the asteroid belt and was cynical over the possibility of never returning to Earth. Like the rest of the lower ranking crew members of the Lewis and Clark, Perez did not know the true purpose of the vessel.

Pyotr Maksimovich
(SC, DtE, A)

Pyotr Maksimovich served as General Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov's personal secretary in the Kremlin for years, dutifully facilitating the day-to-day business of the Soviet Union. He scheduled the leader's meetings with envoys from the Race, the Greater German Reich, and the United States, and Soviet officials such as NKVD head Lavrenty Beria, Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, and Foreign Commissar Andrei Gromyko, among other worthies and not-so-worthies. In 1966, his cousin Mikhail Sergeyevich, who was on diplomatic duty in the USA, sent him a furry, which became the talk of the USSR's higher-ups in short order.

Literary comment
Although he appears in a sizable number of scenes, the character's surname is never given. It is even possible that this person is a historical relative of Mikhail Gorbachev. As Pyotr Maksimovich is a very common name among Russians, it is difficult to search for confirmation of that.

Miriam Rosen
(DtE, A)

Miriam Rosen was the chief medical officer of the American spaceship Lewis and Clark. Glen Johnson found her attractive.

Rosen's duties included taking care of the terminally-ill Liz Brock. She was of the opinion that President Earl Warren would have been impeached and convicted of his attack on the Race's Colonization Fleet if the truth had been learned in a different way.

Benjamin Rubin
(A)

Benjamin Rubin was the leader of a group of nine Jewish partisans in 1965. In the immediate aftermath of the Race-German War of 1965, Rubin and his group stole the explosive-metal bomb Mordechai Anielewicz had kept in Lodz, Poland since 1944. The group was determined to inflict further harm on the Germans in retaliation for Nazi persecution of the Jews. They had planned to detonate it in Dresden, but their truck kept breaking down, and so wound up in the small town of Kanth.

When Anielewicz attempted to negotiate at the request of the Race, the group took him hostage. The Race sent Gorppet as a second negotiator, only to have him meet the same fate. Rubin told Gorppet that he was willing to die like the defenders of Masada in the first century. After a period of time, Rubin met with Anielewicz, who tried to convince him that destroying Kanth would not achieve the group's goals; it was too small a town. Anielewicz also tried to make Rubin see that the Germans were still in a position to hurt the Jews, despite their badly beaten state.

Rubin ordered the bomb detonated. However, Anielewicz' people had not been maintaining it as well as they thought. The bomb did not detonate, and Rubin and his men surrendered themselves to the Race in exchange for safe passage.

Greg Ruzicka
(A)

Greg Ruzicka (b. ca. 1944) was a childhood friend of Jonathan Yeager. The two met in the fourth grade and remained friends throughout their adolescence and into their adulthood. Ruzicka was best man at Yeager's wedding to Karen Culpepper. Like Yeager, Ruzicka practiced Race Mimicking. He also smoked a pack of cigarettes a day despite having been raised at a time when serious health risks associated with the habit were becoming known.

Sadorowicz
(A)

Mr. Sadorowicz was a patient of Reuven Russie. He was diagnosed with lung disease likely caused by smoking. Sadorowicz did not take heed of Reuven's warnings on the dangers of tobacco and even refused to have an X-ray check recommended by Reuven, who remained puzzled by Sadorowicz's stubbornness and his reasons for seeing him.

Bahadur Singh
(SC)

Bahadur Singh was an Indian medical student in Professor Shpaaka's class at Russie Medical College. His turban marked him as a Sikh. He confided to Reuven Russie his hope that ginger would drive the Race to distraction long enough for India to free itself. Reuven replied "It could be so," but privately doubted this. Reuven's attitude toward the matter was coloured by his belief that his country, Palestine, was better off with the Lizards than without them.

Anna Suslova
(SC)

Anna Suslova was a Russian student at Russie Medical College. She was so thick-headed that Reuven Russie believed she'd had "help" to get into the school. When Professor Shpaaka asked for suggestions on how the Race could deal with the ginger crisis, Suslova implied, the Race should make ginger use punishable by death. Shpaaka replied the Race preferred not to spill the blood of its own kind. Suslova said, her country had always killed people first and worried about consequences afterward. Without this ruthlessness, the SSSR would have been conquered during the Race Invasion of Tosev 3. Shpaaka pointed out that many Russians would be happier under Race rule than Soviet rule, which angered the Russian girl when it finally got through to her that this was probably true. Reuven, whose country of Palestine was a perfect example of what Shpaaka proposed, felt no need to say anything.

Lucy Vegetti
(A)

Lucy Vegetti was a geologist aboard the Lewis and Clark. She befriended and had a brief sexual relationship with Glen Johnson.

Victor Watkins
(A)

Victor Watkins was sheriff of Desert Center, California. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota but had lived in Desert Center for more than 30 years. He escorted Sam Yeager to observe invasive alien plants and animals brought by the Race near Desert Center. Watkins was not too keen on the alien ecosystem that was damaging Earth and hoped for a resolution in eliminating them.

Frankie Wong
(SC)

Frankie Wong (d. 1963) was an American lawyer who practiced in Los Angeles, California. Wong was a second-generation American citizen; his grandfather had been a Chinese peasant who left his home in Guangdong Province as a young man in the late 19th century and moved to the United States to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. Wong was fluent in Chinese, though he was more comfortable with his grandfather's Cantonese dialect than in the more common Mandarin.

In 1963, Wong was hired by the United States to assist Liu Han, the Chinese Communist Party's representative to the United States, by interpreting for her and driving her and her daughter, Liu Mei. He was with the Lius, Sam Yeager, Straha, and Straha's bodyguard Gordon, when they were fired upon by an assassin. Which of the group he was targeting was not clear. Wong was the only one in the group to be hit. He died immediately, leaving behind a wife and children.

Vicki Yamagata
(A)

Vicki Yamagata was Karen Culpepper's maid of honor at her wedding to Jonathan Yeager. Vicki and Karen were old, old friends; they had known each other even longer than had Jonathan and his best man, Greg Ruzicka.