An Odyssey Set in a Near Future of Artificial People

 

Terri Favro's new novel The Sisters Sputnik (May, 2022) picks up where her acclaimed speculative fiction novel Sputnik's Children  leaves off.  The Sisters Sputnik are a time-travelling trio of storytellers-for-hire who are much in demand throughout the multiverse of 2,054 alternate worlds. Each world was created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Earth Standard Time, home time-world of the Sisters' leader, aging comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi, her millennial apprentice Unicorn Girl and their pop culture-spouting 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.

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In a distant alternate reality where books and music have disappeared, Debbie finds herself in bed with an old lover who begs her to tell him a story. Over one long eventful night, she spins the epic of the Sisters' adventures in the multiverse of 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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Headshot by Ayelet Tsabari