El. knyga: Sisters Sputnik

In this sequel to Sputnik’s 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 peopleThe 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. Sales and Market BulletsA sci-fi adventure with a lost story at its heart, similar to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Heavily influenced by superhero comic books and strips, the novel will appeal to fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Natalie Zina Walschots’s Hench.The “synthetics” in the novel are based on real robots that the author saw at Carnegie Mellon and other universities while researching her pop science book, Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact and Speculation.The Sisters Sputnik can be read as a standalone novel and also as a sequel to Sputnik’s Children, which was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020 and shortlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, Adult Fiction, and received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.Favro combines four genres intelligently and entertainingly: comic books, apocalyptic, AI apocalypse, and time travel.Both The Sisters Sputnik and Sputnik’s Children are influenced by Favro’s Italian-Canadian heritage, especially her grandmother’s years in New York City of the early 20th century. Her family history formed part of the narrative for a 2019 LuLu Films/TeleLatino Network documentary about Italian-Canadians at Ellis Island, where Favro appeared as an on-screen guide and storyteller.AudienceFans of Sputnik’s ChildrenReaders of the sci-fi/fantasy genreReaders of apocalyptic fictionBoomers and those who grew up in the ‘atomic age’Comic book/superhero fans (especially of tongue-in-cheek series like Guardians of the Galaxy)