Characters:
Fictional, Real, and Everything in Between
The people in Of Our Own Device fall into three different categories, and this section tells you which is which rather than leaving you to guess. Most of the cast, including all four characters below, is entirely fictional: invented people placed inside a real historical moment, with backgrounds built on real history but no real-world counterpart of their own. A smaller number are loosely based on, or inspired by, real individuals — figures who lend a trait, a circumstance, or a general shape to an invented character without that character being a claim about who the real person actually was. A third, smaller group still are real, named public figures who appear in the novel as themselves; their interactions with the book’s fictional characters — the scenes, the dialogue, the events — are the author’s own dramatization, not historical record. Where a character on this site falls into the second or third category, the page says so directly, the same way it would flag any other invented detail standing next to a verified fact.
Main Cast
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Jack Smith
Jack grew up in a part of rural Wyoming where the nearest neighbors were eight or ten miles off and school was an hour’s drive each way. Carbon County’s income figures from those years actually look respectable on paper — boosted by the coal, oil, and uranium money pouring into the state through the 1970s […]
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Eton Volkonsky
Eton’s mother, Vera, descends from two of the oldest names in Russia, both of which met, by chance of marriage, in her own parents — and neither name was supposed to survive the century. Her father’s line runs back to Prince Sergei Volkonsky, one of the young aristocrat-officers who rose against the tsar in the […]
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Lara Novikova
Lara Novikova belongs to a class the Soviet system wasn’t supposed to have, and never officially admitted to: the nomenklatura, the children and spouses of Party and ministerial officials who lived a visibly different life from everyone around them — better apartments, foreign goods, travel clearances, doors that opened because of whose daughter you were […]
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Joe Coburn
Joe Coburn is the person who spotted Jack, assessed him as potential and recruited him into the Company. They first crossed paths at Ramstein, where Jack was a young soldier driving the motor pool and Joe was a passenger on his way to meetings in Munich. They stayed in touch (if you’ve read the novel, […]
