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Description
An odyssey wrapped in a love story, set in a near-future of artificial people
The Sisters Sputnik are a time-traveling trio of storytellers-for-hire who are much in demand throughout the multiverse of 2,052 alternate worlds. Each world was created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Earth Standard Time, home of the Sisters’ leader, aging comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi, her 20-something apprentice Unicorn Girl, and their pop culture–loving AI, Cassandra. Tales of Earth Standard Time-That-Was, from World Wars to the space race to Hollywood celebrities, have turned the Sisters into storytelling rock stars.
In a distant reality where books and music have disappeared, Debbie finds herself in bed with an old Earth Standard Time lover who begs her to tell him a story. Over one long, eventful night, she spins the epic of the Sisters’ adventures in alternate realities, starting with the theft of a book of evil comic strips in a post-pandemic Toronto full of ghost kitchens and robot-worshipping lost children known as junksters, to a disco-era purgatory where synthetic people are sending humans into the past through a reverse-engineered Statue of Liberty, to a version of the 1950s where the Sisters meet a rising star named Frank Sinatra and his girlfriend, the once-and-future Queen of England.
Contributor Notes
Raised in Niagara wine country, Terri Favro grew up with an electrician father who worked with the first factory robot and built his own robots at home. The experience fueled Favro’s lifelong love of science fiction, comic books, and space exploration. A novelist, storyteller, essayist, and graphic novel writer, Favro is also an award-winning advertising copywriter who worked on campaigns for emerging technologies that changed the world. Terri lives in Toronto.
Editorial Review
“It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It’s a breezy joy.” — Publishers Weekly
“Destined to become a sci-fi, pop culture classic, The Sisters Sputnik is sassy, smart, funny and sharp. A tilt-a-whirl through the ages, chronicled in Favro’s often hilarious and always insightful prose, with cameos by Sinatra and Elvis and a fabulously re-imagined Queen Elizabeth. We stop at Ellis Island, tour Toronto in loving detail and get to hang out at Studio 54. The novel deftly juggles the shifting cultures of generations past, present and future, seen through a steampunk lens — Terri Favro is sci-fi’s Douglas Coupland, chronicling our lives with a keen eye and taking the reader on a fabulous journey.” — Lisa de Nikolits, author of The Rage Room
“Terri Favro’s writing hums with otherworldly power. Brighter than Technicolor, faster than Wi-Fi. How lucky we are to exist at the same time, on the same planet, as this book. The Sisters Sputnik is pure delight.” — Paul Vermeersch, author of Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020
“The Sisters Sputnik is a wild, manic, frantic performance of speculative fiction, a time-travelling, alternate-world-jumping novel that never fails to entertain, even as dark themes, so relevant to our own space and time, lurk beneath its surface. A worthy sequel to Sputnik’s Children, this new installment is like your favourite comic book brought to life in prose.” — Mark Sampson, author of All the Animals on Earth, The Slip and Sad Peninsula
“Together, the Sisters Sputnik are the badassest kickass duo since Tank Girl and Jet Girl. If you like your speculative fiction sardonic, weird, sprightly and intelligent, you will love this splendid book.” — Candas Jane Dorsey, author of Black Wine and Ice and Other Stories
