The main characters are Scott Warden, a programmer whose life is ripped apart by events of the Chronolith appearances, Sulamith "Sue" Chopra, a scientist devoted to study them, Morris Torrance and Hitch Paley, a former criminal and a former FBI agent who aid her, Janice and Kaitlin, respectively ex-wife and daughter of Scott, Adam Mills, the main antagonist, and his mother Ashlee.
This work provides examples of:
- Alliterative Family: Adam Mills's mother is named Ashlee.
- All There in the Manual: Averted. Most cultural references are made as addressing someone who already knows them.
- Antagonistic Offspring: Ashlee's son Adam, a psychopathic devotee of Kuin who has his mother tortured for information and his stepsister gangraped.
- Anti-Hero: Hitch, definitely. He's somewhere between a Type IV and a Type V. Scott may well be a Type I. Even Sue, with her delusions, has aspects of this.
- Applied Phlebotinum: All the Tau-technology used to create the Chronoliths.
- The Atoner: Scott spents several chapters doing this.
- Badass Biker: Adam Mills and his gang of Kuin loyalists.
- Black Shirt: Adam Mills, Whitman Delahunt, and the rest of the Kuinists.
- Book Dumb: Adam was a failure in school, but as Ashlee points out, it takes a lot of brains to survive on the streets for as long as he has. Hitch is also an example.
- Break the Cutie: If something can go wrong and hurt Kaitlin, it will.
- But at the end it all gets better, of course.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Inflicted by Adam on Hitch, Ashlee, and Kait.
- Cult: There really is no better way to describe the Kuinists. They're a religious cult who believe that Kuin will reward them upon his actual appearance.
- Dark Messiah: Kuin grows into this, with an entire quasi-religious cult based around his prophesied appearance.
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: Played straight with Kuin. And to the very ultimate extreme
- The Heavy: Adam, who moves the storyline, is the only disciple of Kuin to actually have a face and may in fact be Kuin himself.
- Incompatible Orientation: Supergenius Ray has a crush on the lesbian (and aromantic) Sue, largely because she is one of the few people who can understand his theories.
- Ivy League For Every One: Scott and Janice met while attending to Cornell. Ray comes from MIT.
- Love Martyr: Ray to Sue (for the entire book), Ashlee to Adam (until the end).
- Made of Iron: Adam manages to survive the arrival of two Chronoliths and the destruction of one without protection.
- Scotty and Sue did that and also were at the arrival of the Chronolith in Jerusalem, but most of the time they were inside bunkers.
- Meaningful Name: Adam Quinn Mills
- Older Hero vs. Younger Villain: Scott, Sue, Hitch, Ray, Moris, and Ashlee are all middle-aged. Adam is barely into his twenties.
- Rape as Drama: Happens to Kait. Twice.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Sue does this about the creation of Wyoming's chronolith
- Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Chronoliths get bigger and bigger as the story advances.
- Stable Time Loop: Although, according to Sue, it only seems to be this, but if you watch it in nine-dimension geometry everything is okay.
- Take Over the World: What Kuin will eventually do. Supposedly.
- Teens Are Monsters: Adam has been engaging in sociopathic, self-destructive behaviour since before he was 17.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: Even before you move there.
- You Already Changed the Past: Perhaps. See Stable Time Loop.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Played straight with the events marked in Chronoliths, and more ambiguously with the lives of the characters.
