The Sisters Sputnik
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lively, rambling yarn, a return to the world of Favro's Sputnik's Children, begins when two itinerant Storytellers arrive in one of the many alternate timelines created by nuclear explosions. Debbie and her protégé, Unicorn Girl, are ready to entertain the locals with fantastic tales and true history from their home in Earth Standard Time. But when Debbie recognizes their host for the night as a lover she'd believed dead, she spends the night bringing him up to date on her adventures instead. Besides creating the hit comic book Sputnik Chick: Girl with No Past, Debbie saved the inhabitants of Atomic Mean Time by merging them with their doppelgängers in Earth Standard Time just as WWIII was erupting—or so she'd believed until she found herself trapped in Atomic Shadow Time, the frozen moment before WWIII, where junksters (social outcasts who aspire to become machines) serve human-robot hybrids. And so it goes, one mind-boggling concept after another as Debbie relays her experiences ricocheting around the time continuum catching glimpses of scrambled worlds, including one in which Frank Sinatra is dating Queen Elizabeth. The narrative doesn't quite pull everything together in the end, but it does what readers ask of a Storyteller: keeps things fast-moving and entertaining. It's a breezy joy.
