Viewpoint Characters of “The Inheritors”

1. Anne-Elise Kirby, a nuclear physicist and the director of an experimental fusion lab in Florida. She is absolutely brilliant and absolutely bitter. Her tongue is acidic. She’s even more of a misanthrope than I am, and her dislike includes everyone in her own family except her twin brother, to whom she is unhealthily emotionally attached and possessive. She tends to unload her rants and complaints on him (not directed at him, but rather, as a supposed listening ear), and he nods along while tuning it out. She holds deep resentment over her past as a teen in a broken family; she and her brother were emotionally neglected while their parents focused on the wild older sister and fell into marital and personal difficulties of their own. Anne-Elise is an extremely successful person materially, but not emotionally.

2. Edward Kirby, twin brother of Anne-Elise. He works at the Hurricane Center, owns a small plane, and is an accomplished aviator who also sometimes flies as a NOAA Hurricane Hunter. He knows how cool this makes him… perhaps a little too well. His favorite research topic is extreme tropical weather, and he developed a forecasting model for very extreme storms. The model is designed for tropical cyclone development in a warmed climate. He hoped it would never need to be used. He loves his family, but doesn’t really like any of them, including his sister Anne-Elise. He sees her as bitter and deeply emotionally unwell. However, he is no saint either; he also has a young employee with a Ph. D. whom he asks to bring him his coffee and eyeballs furtively from his desk.

3. Vera Mellor, daughter of Anne-Elise and Edward’s older sibling Chelsea. A progressive climate activist who specializes in stunts, such as blocking traffic, defacing things, and disrupting events. She doesn’t approve of anyone in her family, thinking they are all part of the problem, and considers her fellow activists her real family. Her dislike of her estranged parents is understandable, but she includes her aunt and uncle in her sweeping disapproval as well. She opposes nuclear energy because her organization opposes nuclear energy, mouthing the slogan “We Can’t Invent Our Way Out of Disaster” and considering it a moral hazard for people not to have to change their lifestyles because of innovation. Ultimately she has a deep psychological need to be seen as morally superior to others, to compensate for the “sins” of her family and “expunge” them from herself, and that can only be achieved by individual behavioral “purity,” something that sweeping innovations would render irrelevant.

4. Chelsea Mellor, estranged mother of Vera. As a teen, she was extremely wild and got into trouble. She became pregnant as a high school sophomore and had an abortion. She straightened out in college, but became very, very rigid, like a former alcoholic becoming an evangelistic teetotaler. She married her college boyfriend, a right-wing Republican, and immersed herself in that kind of politics alongside him. She believes that “being a good wife” has saved her from making further mistakes. Her husband Richard is now the press secretary for a far-right climate-denier Florida congressman who has presidential ambitions. The congressman supports Big Oil and is using his seat in Congress to harass climate scientists and green energy innovators. On behalf of the congressman, the Mellors have cultivated a positive professional relationship with right-wing TV host Madison “Mad Dog” Chadleigh, who uses his platform to target anyone seen as an enemy of the populist far right.

Background on the elder Kirby divorce and breakdown: Chelsea was the firstborn, being five years older than the twins. However, she did not follow the stereotypical pattern for a firstborn. Instead of being a stickler and a leader, she was wild and rebellious. In high school, she got pregnant and had an abortion. It was around the time that the Kirby parents started having marital difficulties, the elder Mr. Kirby began drinking, and they ultimately divorced very messily two years later. This is why Anne-Elise blames Chelsea for the family breakdown. She was denied a parental role model and a close sibling to look up to. As a result, she has become unhealthily (though not incestuously) close to her twin brother. The two of them essentially had to “stick together against the world,” or at least, the chaos in their own family when they were young.