Sisters Sputnik

(Paperback)

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Description

In this sequel to Sputniks Children, The Sisters Sputnik takes undocumented time immigrant Debbie Reynolds Biondi and her apprentice Unicorn Girl on a wild ride through alternate worlds, into a possible future where robots rule and humans are banished to the past.

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.

'It does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. Its a breezy joy.' Publishers Weekly

Reviews

"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
"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
"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

Author Bio

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.