The Sisters Sputnik: A Novel
$15.99-
“It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It’s a breezy joy.” — Publishers Weekly
“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
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.
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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.
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Published: May 2022
ISBN: 9781770416086
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 in.
Pages: 416
Reviews
“It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It’s a breezy joy.” — Publishers Weekly
“This innovative setting is filled with surprises, including personality-laden AIs, robot-worshipping lost children known as junksters, and a robot plot to return everybody to the country and era of their ancestors’ migration to Canada, keeping the reader thoroughly engaged throughout.” — Booklist Online
“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
“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
“This novel may be the most original and thought-provoking alternate history since Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” — Fantastic Writer blog
“Summarizing the plot is impossible. There are many crazy adventures, mostly centred in alternate Torontos, and a host of weird characters with different names and shifting identities depending on the area code of the reality we’re in. Underlying it all is a message about the power of stories to mould reality in a variety of eccentric directions.” — Toronto Star
“Highly recommended for those interested in a more human-centric, creative type of science fiction.” — Biblio Bloggity Boo blog
“It was very imaginative and had interesting villains and robots. I liked how the known and unknown were mixed up. We get to see both the familiar (Niagara Falls, Frank Sinatra, etc.) and the unfamiliar (cyborgs, alternate worlds, etc.).” — Kristenelle SFF Reader YouTube Channel
“Time travelers, storytellers, and evolving synthetic beings lead Terri Favro’s tour de force novel … This rich, imaginative story is piled with threats both bygone and ongoing; it contains nostalgic callbacks to mid century dreams, but also an understanding of the dangers of nostalgia itself … The Sisters Sputnik is a multiverse tale unlike any you’ve read before.” — Foreword Reviews
“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
“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
“The Sisters Sputnik is that best of all things: a book that transports you to multiple worlds while calling all the while to your beating human heart. Terri Favro has crafted a multiverse-spanning tale filled with all manner of tender surprises. A rollicking, wild adventure of a book.” — Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife
“Ingenious, smoothly written, and funny, at times bitingly so, The Sisters Sputnik is well worth a read.” — The Miramichi Reader
“This book is … highly unique; a pop-culture jambalaya; a literary paella; psychedelic fiction. Think Harlan Ellison and Thomas Disch meet Ernest Cline and Charlie N. Holmberg and the four of them write a story.” — Looking for a Good Book blog
“Favro is canny enough to bury her messages under layers of entertaining derring-do, time-skipping adventure, and even some romance.” — That Shakespearean Rag
“This meta, multiversal narrative makes for a unique read from one of the most expansive imaginations in CanLit.” — The Quarantine Review