Dr. François Leclerc is introduced in Chapter 14 where he speaks more than Stratt or Grace combined.

Stratt describes him as “a world-renowned climatologist from Paris” and he has been put in charge of “tracking, understanding, and ameliorating the climate effects of Astrophage”.

While he only appears in Chapter 14, he is mentioned by Stratt a few times in Chapter 26 and Grace thinks of him at the start of Chapter 30.

Leclerc’s direct speech consists of 49 quoted passages, 1,034 tokens, and 439 unique words.

He is the only character to say the words ‘hippie’, ‘politics’, ‘continental’, ‘antiwar’, ‘arctic’, ‘moderate’, ‘cyclone’, ‘distant’, ‘hugging’, ‘conquistadors’, ‘roiling’, ‘marching’, ‘humidity’, ‘soy’, ‘wheat’, ‘millet’, ‘impact’, ‘horrific’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘stream’, ‘annihilation’, ‘Lyon’, ‘stopgap’, ‘maelstrom’, ‘glacier’, ‘Spanish’, ‘lush’, ‘childhood’, ‘detonated’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘explosions’, ‘potato’, ‘affecting’, ‘convoluted’, ‘decomposed’, ‘crusader’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘activist’, ‘snow’, ‘paddy’, ‘lunatic’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘tornado’, ‘barley’, ‘tropical’, ‘bygone’, ‘greater’, ‘tapestry’, ‘sloths’, ‘parasites’, ‘trapped’, ‘Greece’, ‘strike’, ‘infancy’, ‘unapologetic’, ‘throwback’, ‘staple’, ‘era’, ‘Italy’, ‘nightmarish’, ‘cleave’, ‘denier’, ‘disruptions’, ‘upheaval’, ‘fissure’, ‘fungal’, ‘snowed’, ‘inexact’, ‘thunder’, ‘phenomena’, ‘detonation’, or ‘bizarre’ and the only person other than the narrator to use the words ‘honest’, ‘floods’, ‘notably’, ‘ordering’, ‘burning’, ‘languages’, ‘buried’, ‘dumping’, ‘warmth’, ‘shelf’, ‘born’, ‘aside’, ‘orange’, ‘giant’, ‘south’, ‘unpredictable’, ‘protest’, ‘levels’, ‘calories’, ‘freezes’, ‘drift’, ‘biomes’, ‘changing’, ‘became’, ‘shifting’, ‘ranch’, ‘jungle’, ‘dies’, ‘experiences’, ‘intervals’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘shockwave’, ‘potatoes’, ‘partially’, ‘rectangles’, ‘outcome’, ‘season’, ‘shoulders’, ‘patterns’, ‘places’, ‘region’, ‘sinking’, ‘European’, ‘froze’, or ‘guesswork’.