Tyrone Slothrop is an American soldier stationed in London during the closing stages of World War II. Coming from a family that lost its fortune during the Great Depression, he is naturally gifted at attracting women but struggles with an unexplainable condition where his sexual arousal eerily correlates with the locations of incoming V2 rocket strikes. He is highly paranoid, sensing a vast, unseen conspiracy manipulating his life, which drives him to search for answers across the European theater in various disguises.

Pointsman is a high-class vivisectionist and scientist working at the White Visitation, a psychological warfare facility. He is obsessed with Pavlovian conditioning and intensely focused on studying Slothrop's bizarre biological connection to the rocket bombings. Desperate for funding and recognition, he is willing to manipulate his colleagues and superiors to achieve his cold, calculated research goals.

Captain Blicero, also known as Weissmann, is a sadistic and tyrannical German military officer who commands a rocket launch site. He holds a colonial history intertwined with horrific violence, bringing his obsession with death and domination into his intricate, abusive relationships. He uses elaborate sadomasochistic roleplay to completely break and remold the identities of those under his control.

Enzian is the leader of the Schwarzkommando, a group of Herero rocket scientists displaced from former German colonies in Africa. He carries the heavy burden of ensuring his people's survival in a chaotic postwar environment. Shaped by his traumatic history under colonial violence and personal abuse, he leads his faction with a quasi-religious reverence for rocket technology.

Katje is a Dutch woman who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands before defecting to British intelligence. Carrying immense guilt over her complicity and her family's colonial past, she agrees to participate in psychological operations to atone for her actions. She frequently finds herself trapped in manipulative power structures, both past and present.

Roger Mexico is a brilliant statistician working for British intelligence at the White Visitation. He calculates the statistical probabilities of the rocket strikes, firmly believing in mathematics over the paranormal theories favored by his eccentric colleagues. He is deeply cynical about the war but finds temporary solace in his clandestine romance with a coworker.

Jessica is a young woman working at the White Visitation who engages in a passionate, secret affair with Roger Mexico. Though she cares for Roger, she is heavily conflicted about their future, often weighing his chaotic, emotional nature against the safety and predictability of her official boyfriend.

Captain Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice is an officer in British intelligence who possesses the unique psychic ability to vicariously experience the daydreams and fantasies of others. He uses this talent to relieve important figures of their exhausting mental burdens. He operates a safehouse in London and works with resistance groups across Europe.

Tchitcherine is an officer with the Soviet intelligence services who is obsessed with locating a specific German rocket. Operating in the chaotic postwar Zone, he moves through a complex web of drug addiction and military bureaucracy while carrying a deep, personal vendetta related to his family history.

Major Marvy is a boisterous, highly bigoted American officer scouring the postwar Zone for rocket technology on behalf of corporate interests. He aggressively pursues anyone he views as a threat or a target, often utilizing brute force and aligning himself with whoever can further his mission.

Geli Tripping is a young woman in the Zone who calls herself a witch and aligns herself with the natural, ecological forces of the world. She is deeply attuned to the environment and actively rejects the bureaucratic, death-driven machinations of the military forces surrounding her.

Margherita Erdmann is a German actress who previously starred in vaguely pornographic horror movies. Her sense of reality is deeply fractured, and she easily slips into the various traumatic, sadomasochistic roles she once played on film. She frequently participates in the black market and the chaotic party scene of the postwar Zone.

Bianca is Margherita's young daughter, a child who has grown up surrounded by the film industry and her mother's erratic, often abusive behavior. Despite her youth, she possesses an unsettling awareness of the dark, adult world around her and seeks an escape from her turbulent life aboard the ship Anubis.

Franz Pökler is a German rocket researcher who worked under the Nazi regime. He is a deeply conflicted man who rationalized his contributions to a destructive weapons program by focusing solely on his love for his daughter, whom he believes was being used as leverage by his cruel commanders.

Leni Pökler is Franz's estranged wife, a woman who abandoned her husband's passive complicity to join radical student movements in the Weimar Republic era. She frequently seeks out mystical and political revolution, struggling to survive and provide for her young child in a dangerous political climate.

Gerhard Von Göll is a German film director and black-market smuggler operating under the alias Der Springer. He believes his cinematic creations have the power to alter reality and manifest actual events in the Zone, blurring the lines between propaganda, art, and the tangible world.

Laszlo Jamf is a brilliant but amoral chemist and psychologist whose inventions and experiments cast a long shadow over the novel's events. Though largely absent from the present narrative, his development of unique chemicals and his early behavioral conditioning of children deeply influence the grand conspiracies surrounding the rockets.

Gottfried is a young, white submissive who operates under the complete, dominating control of a cruel military officer. Enduring horrific psychological and physical conditioning, he views his captivity through a heavily traumatized, fairy-tale-like lens.

Teddy Bloat is a British intelligence agent and an old college friend of Slothrop's office mate. He acts as a covert photographer, secretly documenting Slothrop's desk and personal map to feed information back to the researchers monitoring the American soldier.

Oliver "Tantivy" Mucker-Maffick is a reserved British intelligence officer and Slothrop's immediate coworker. Unlike the chaotic Slothrop, Tantivy is highly organized and shy, occasionally expressing envy at Slothrop's romantic success while remaining a steadfast, kind presence in his life.

Brigadier Pudding is an elderly veteran of World War I who commands the psychological research facility at the White Visitation. Suffering from the lingering traumas of trench warfare, he is easily manipulated by his subordinates who orchestrate elaborate scenarios to exploit his traumatic memories and maintain their funding.

Säure Bummer is a prominent German drug dealer operating in the postwar Zone. He frequently organizes black market operations and has a deep passion for debating classical music, providing Slothrop with various disguises and connections to the criminal underworld.

Bodine is an American Navy seaman who fully embraces the chaotic, lawless nature of the Zone, dealing and consuming large quantities of drugs. He is heavily involved in the black market and hosts bizarre, drug-fueled events among the ruins of the war.

Broderick Slothrop is Tyrone's father, a man who lost the family's wealth during the Great Depression. Seeking a way to secure his son's future, he strikes a dubious bargain with an experimental psychologist, fundamentally altering his child's life in exchange for a Harvard scholarship.

Lyle Bland is Tyrone's wealthy uncle, deeply involved in corporate maneuvering and secret societies like the Freemasons. His extensive connections to chemical companies and psychological studies play a massive background role in the conspiracies enveloping his nephew.

Grigori is a trained octopus utilized in behavioral experiments by British intelligence. Conditioned to react to specific visual cues, Grigori is deployed as a living weapon to orchestrate a dramatic, terrifying encounter on a beach.

Dr. Spectro is a hospital physician focused on treating patients with war-neurosis and repressed emotions. His access to human subjects makes him the envy of his colleagues at the White Visitation before the ongoing war disrupts his medical work.

Carroll Eventyr is a psychic medium working for psychological warfare operations. He serves as a spiritual conduit to channel the dead for intelligence purposes, though he retains no conscious memory of the information he gleans during these deep trances.

Peter Sacha is a deceased German man whose spirit is frequently contacted by British intelligence mediums. In life, he was a sarcastic, politically engaged medium himself, running in circles that included both communist revolutionaries and corporate fascists.

Klaus Närrisch is a German rocket scientist who worked on guidance systems before being swept up in the chaotic postwar black market. Betrayed by former colleagues, he aligns himself with smugglers to evade capture by advancing military forces.

Ilse is the daughter of a prominent rocket scientist and a radical activist. Raised in an unstable political environment and eventually confined to a concentration camp, she serves as the emotional leverage used by the military to ensure her father's continued compliance in the rocket program.