From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia

List of Beach Surgery characters

This list covers named and significant unnamed characters appearing in A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight and its adaptations. Major protagonists and recurring cross-oeuvre figures are marked *.

Major protagonists

• Leif* — A military engineer in a state of physical damage and memory loss. Begins the story unable to walk, unable to see (bandages over his eyes), and with an external pacemaker regulating his heart. Devoted to Katita by a love "she has fashioned in the most surgically strategic of ways." At the climax, white wings erupt from his shoulder-blades and he briefly flies before crashing. An anagram of "Life."^[1] Recurs across Smith's oeuvre transformed: see instruments of return.

• Katita* — A young woman in a hybrid costume between nurse and sword-wielding assassin. Red hair, red kitten heels, flak jacket dusted with red desert sand, first-aid kit and bastardised samurai sword. Does not smile until the final scenes. The agent of the cycle, cold and strategic, devoted to "break[ing] the cycle"—reversing the world's spin. Derived from the narrator's memory of a redhead medical intern met at a Street Fighter tournament and married; name synthesised from her fox ears. Recurs in *Fellow Disjecta*, *Saltando*, *A Billiard Table with Five Balls and Twelve Cues*, and *Pugil*.

Supporting cast — Newcastle (Half One)

• Mr and Mrs McRae — Elderly couple in an apartment accessed from Bolton Street car park. Equipped with pendant exoskeletons ("the Mighty Mechas"), deployed in a mechanical battle in Chapter 1.

• The preschool children — Unnamed group encountered in an abandoned preschool in Chapter 2. Leif tells them stories; one of the story's few moments of gentleness.

• Dirtheart activists — Animal-masked environmental and AI-rights protesters; rooftop encounter in Chapter 2; recurring antagonists across adaptations.

• The mechanical seagull — A giant mechanical bird that snatches Leif and Katita above the harbour in Chapter 3.

Supporting cast — The interior (Half Two)

• The mechanic — Service-station mechanic in the red-desert interior who is also, impossibly, the police officer Leif tackled in Newcastle. His dual identity exemplifies identity slippage; Leif sees "ten layered versions" of him.^[2]

• The farmer — Unnamed figure whose wood-chipper mech pursues them in Chapter 6's climactic chaos.

• The boar — Domesticated boar tied to a grazing robot, released by Katita in Chapter 5. Fandom reads its liberation as minor rebellion within the cycle.

• The Wild dogs — Pack pursuing Leif and Katita during the final cabin sequence (Chapter 6).

Embedded tale characters

• Rico the Architect — Protagonist of the embedded tale Katita tells in Chapter 2. An architect who can build functioning miniature cities inside other people's bodies, but never inside himself (no mirror works). Leif responds: *"I knew every word of it before you said it."*^[3]

• Mylar — Surgeon and Rico's lover. Performs "her surgery" on Rico, causing his body to fuse with a breathing town hall; windows glow crimson; the doorway warps into "a contented smile."

Frame characters (the narrator's real life)

• The narrator / C. W. Smith — Play/childhood-development expert and the novel's first-person voice. Ran a UN workshop in Shanbudia on "how children might play in the cities of the future." Erupts (a filmed public breakdown) at the closing dinner. Writing this testament before his first child is born. Leif and Katita are derived from his lived experience and marriage.

• The redhead medical intern (the wife) — Met the narrator at a Street Fighter tournament in Newcastle, 2001. Katita is partly modeled on her. Artist; grew up near an elderly Nobel-laureate novelist. Fox ears; watermelon/green-flower eyes. At the novel's end, becomes both Leif and Katita fused in the delivery room.

• Les — Dead friend of the narrator. Associated with an aluminium bee automaton; dairy country. Recurs symbolically across Smith's oeuvre.

• Charon (bus driver) — Figure associated with Styx Creek; evokes Dante's ferryman.

Minor/unnamed

• The boy taken by the waves (Leif's origin: he dives from a cliff to save the boy, is smashed unconscious, resuscitated by Katita)
• Refugees arriving by raft (backstory setting)
• The elderly Nobel-laureate novelist (the wife's childhood neighbour)
• The colleague who filmed the narrator's eruption in Shanbudia
• The stranger who left "a portrait of an eruption" (a poem) on the narrator's chest during the flight home
• Military police (Chapter 6)

See also

• Leif and Katita
• A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (story)
• Characters
• Places in Beach Surgery

References

1. ↑ Pastoral Scanlines, meta-disclosure.
2. ↑ A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight, Chapter 4.
3. ↑ A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight, Chapter 2 embedded tale.