Christine Pizan
Christine is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. She is an artist in the brand-new aesthetic of a skin grafting technique to brand images and text into stories directly into the translucent skin of the new breed of humanity orbiting on a space station above a dying earth. It is her 49th birthday, which means she has just one more year to live thanks to a necessary policy mandating people do not live past their 50th birthday as a means of preserving limited water supplies.
Trinculo
Trinculo is a pilot, engineer, inventor and illustrator, but, even more importantly, he is Christine’s closest friend. Together, the two of them are engaged in supporting a resistance movement taking place down on Earth which has the intent of overthrowing the dictator who has just sentenced Trinculo to death.
Jean de Men
Jean de Men is a pointedly Trumpianesque huckster who rode empty celebrity status all the way to fascist authoritarian control of the entire space station. It will be learned that Jean de Men is even worse than he seems and, ultimately, not at all what he appears to be in one of the more shocking plot twists in recent literary history.
Joan of Dirt
As the name implies, the titular character is very much a sort of latter-day Joan of Arc. Her story is detailed in the artwork engraved into Christine’s skin and it is a wild story about visions of the end of the world coming at the hands of ecological fascists like Jean de Men. Before that can come about, however, the supernaturally gifted Joan brings about the end of life on earth for most humans herself through a more natural sort of cosmic cataclysm.
Nyx
In addition to the translucent, genderless, weakened humans aboard the space station and the uniquely gifted Joan, there exists another type of being that survived the cataclysm. They are known as engenderines and are a mutation that is partly human and partly pure energy capable of some pretty neat tricks like teleportation. Nyx is one of them.
