Geoff Broman was an ordinary Mid-Westerner, as he considered himself, graduating in the top three in his high school class. He read a lot and sometimes would read 3 books a week if they were novellas and not big novels. His interests were technology, science and history in no particular order. He considered his classmates to be poorly read because most of them had no idea of the books he read, sometimes bound books from the county public library and sometimes as ebooks downloaded from Amazon.
He was some kind of space-nut in the minds of his friends because he followed the development of the Martian settlement at Candor Cliffs as well as the colony out at Timoron. Timoron was more interesting because it was similar enough to Earth to host a lot of terrestrial norms, like agriculture. He was the only one of his friends to actively pursue emigrating, going out to one of the colonies.
Orlianna Matson was the daughter of a lawyer; well-spoken, attractive in a quiet way, well-read at first meeting her on Blackmon's Trader, out bound for Timoron Colony.