Terri Favro’s much-anticipated novel, The Sputnik Sisters, is a funny, fast-paced hit in any multiverse. Favro is a superstar novelist, graphic novelist, and non-fiction award winning Toronto writer. This summer is a perfect time to dive into this wonderful thrill of a read.
Why a sequel?
To be honest, I hadn’t planned to write a sequel. I was nudged into it by my agent Carolyn Swayze when Sputnik’s Children was optioned. Although a TV series never came to be, I knew there would need to be more than one book to feed it, if it ever did. That was one reason for a sequel, at least at the beginning. Another nudge came from readers. My previous novel, Sputnik’s Children, ended with my Italian-Canadian multiverse-hopper, Debbie Reynolds Biondi, about to start her next adventure with The Trespasser, an MIT quantum physicist from an alternate world that went through a thermonuclear war in 1979. Readers let me know that they’d like me to write the story of what happens next. And then, there were the shockwaves from the U.S. election of 2016, bringing with it an appalling string of hate crimes on both sides of the border. It was as if everyone had suddenly been given permission by the President to be openly racist and sexist, as if this would enable us to return to a mythical time when things were “great”. Would this be like time-travelling to some rosy, alternate version of 1950s, perhaps? People from visible minorities were starting to hear that awful old phrase: “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” People said that to my grandparents – go home, you don’t belong here. Just dig some ditches, lay some cement, and scram. It’s amazing how these ugly old tropes keep resurfacing. Around that time, I was having a drink on College Street with a writer who was struggling to process what was happening in the U.S. – the ‘build the wall’ movement, the rise of blowhard strongman demagogues who seemed to be channelling Mussolini, the shutting down of borders, the fear mongering about caravans of refugees. It was starting to feel like the nineteen-thirties. My writer friend said, “It’s as if the world has regressed – as if we’re going back in time.” Layered onto all this was the fact that I had just finished a very intensive two years of researching and writing a non-fiction book about robots – past, present and future. That book was called Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact and Speculation. It made me consider what our world might be like by 2050. Long story short, I started thinking, not just about my characters, but the entire multiverse I’d created, including our world and mirror versions of it. And that set me off on this imaginative journey through time – forwards, backwards and sideways. I started writing a novel about a world slipping into intolerance, fuelled by anxiety about disease, and increasingly populated by robots and AIs. Some good, some not so good. The Sisters Sputnik are professional storytellers in that multiverse, including in a world that has forgotten how to tell stories.
There has been so much in popular media about the multiverse, did this influence your writing at all?
I’ve always loved alternate-history books and movies, so the multiverse has been part of my imaginative realm since childhood. My first introduction to alternate reality stories was C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia when I was about six years old. Also, one of the stories that influenced Sputnik’s Children was an episode of the original Star Trek series, written by Harlan Ellison, called “City at the Edge of Time”, in which Kirk and Spock end up in Depression era America and realize their actions could change history (by keeping the United States out of World War Two). I love those types of “what if” scenarios, so it was just a hop and a skip into a multiverse where Debbie could journey to worlds that had historically deviated from our world after the atomic bomb was first tested in 1945. In my multiverse, a new world can only be calved by an atomic detonation in our world: according to my research, with all the nuclear testing that has gone on since 1945, there would be over 2,000 alternate worlds (if they followed the physical laws in my books).
I did not, however, anticipate that the publication of The Sisters Sputnik would coincide with the release of the multiverse movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. I guess they’re both part of the zeitgeist!
There are some subtle nods to living in a pandemic or post pandemic world. Was that intentional? Did you edit those touches in during lockdown?
Yes, it was intentional. I had just finished writing the book and sent it to my agent Carolyn Swayze when we went into the first lockdown in March 2020. I went back to her and said, stop reading, I have to revisit the storyline. Even though my novel is speculative fiction, it is set in a real-ish version of Toronto of 2025; I didn’t think I could pretend that the pandemic hadn’t happened. At first, the rethink seemed easy: I assumed that by 2025 we’d be feeling some residual impacts of the pandemic, but that it would essentially be slipping from memory, the way the 1918 pandemic slipped from our collective memories. Luckily an alternate world that I’d already invented as a framing device – which had forgotten how to tell stories and make music – could easily have been a world where creativity had been quashed by social isolation due to repeated pandemics. People were afraid to get together and collaborate, dance, sing, fall in love. Artistic stagnation set in. So that change almost wrote itself.
ECW Press picked up the book in April 2020 and of course things followed an even more unpredictable course after that! I did several revisions over time to reflect the changes I saw unfolding in our locked-down world – such as the rise of ghost kitchens, the emptying out of office buildings, and the possibility that some youngsters would fall through the cracks, socially and educationally. That’s how the robot worshipping junksters came to be. So by the time the novel begins, we’re already on the other side of all that.
The sequel, although very funny and witty, is also a bit darker, why?
I’ve been asked this question a few times. My natural voice as a writer is humorous and sometimes satirical; I’m not even particularly aware of writing that way. But unlike Sputnik’s Children, which was a look backwards at Cold War paranoia through a nostalgic lens, The Sisters Sputnik was written during a time when the world really did seem to be falling into darkness. I’d describe it as Doctor Strangelove meets Wonder Woman, with a bit of Narnia thrown in for good measure. That’s why the characters keep finding lampposts in the wilderness of an alternate world: C.S. Lewis was there before them.
The characters’ realities seem so real and natural. How did you keep it all straight? Did you have to make diagrams or charts?
I went through many rounds of edits with the wonderful Jen Hale, who also edited Sputnik’s Children. She helped me make sure that the characters’ journeys through the multiverse had a solid, internal logic holding things together, even when they journey back to the 1950s. Everything in this novel also needed to connect back to the characters and laws of quantum voyaging set out in the first novel. But I would be lying if I said this was easy!
There is a point in the novel where Debbie has to face her own mortality. This feels like an important message to us all. Was that your intention?
Early in the book, Debbie learns that she has a fatal illness called time sickness. She doesn’t have a lot of time left, but she’s not great at putting her affairs in order. She still suffers from the delusion most of us have that she can cheat death. But this does motivate her to take actions (like hiring a young apprentice named Unicorn Girl) that drive the story forward. Facing your own mortality is a great way to provide fuel to keep a story burning. Also, I like Debbie, am an aging ‘time traveller’. I’m acutely aware that life can be taken away in the blink of an eye. Several friends and colleagues of mine died unexpectedly over the last two years, and I almost lost someone very close to me in a non-Covid health crisis. All this was happening as I was going through edits, so I think you are seeing some of the impacts in the novel. I call myself a time traveller because, really, we all are – especially as we age, we tend to live in several versions of reality. Our pasts never really leave us. Do you know that party game where you’re asked, “How old do you feel inside?” and everyone says “Twenty-one”? We do tend to carry our past versions of ourselves inside our heads. But as you get older, you also tend to keep looking ahead, to try to figure out how things will play out for you. Will you have time to write that next book? Will the pandemic ever completely be over? Will there be another bull market? Will Trump run again? Will our climate becoming completely unliveable? As a result, many of us carbon-based life forms have a hard time living in the moment. We are all by nature time travellers.
All the Italian references are still so fun in this sequel. How has your Italian heritage played a role in all these alternate realities?
I gave Debbie Reynolds Biondi my own ethnic heritage in the first book, which follows her into The Sisters Sputnik.Her Nonna Peppy – who made multiple trips back and forth from North America to Italy, as my own grandparents all did – is a major character in both books, reflecting my own relationship with my Nonna Gigi (real name Rosa). Like Peppy, she was nicknamed for her dog and spent her formative years in New York. I had a lot of fun with Peppy in this book. I also introduced Frank Sinatra circa 1956 as a character.
In the novel, members of Toronto’s heritage groups are gathered into settlements on the Leslie Street Spit before being sent “back where they came from” (to the time and place from which their ancestors emigrated) through a reverse migration machine. Debbie ends up in a settlement called New Rome, made up of Italian-Canadians, many of whom have only the foggiest notion of modern Italy and don’t know the language at all. Everyone gets a QR code on their cheek to make sure they’re transported to wherever their parents or grandparents (or more distant ancestors) started out. Even Indigenous peoples are slated for transport to the past – to the Bering Strait of 13,000 years ago.
I also introduced a character called Old Eufemia, an Italian senior with dementia who turns into a heroic figure as the book progresses. I named her for my good friend, the wonderful Italian-Canadian writer and editor Eufemia Fantetti, whose work I’ve always deeply admired. My version of Eufemia is going to be a key character in the next book in the series. And yes, there will be cannoli.
When is the television mini-series coming out and has Elisabeth Moss already signed on?
Ha! From your lips to God’s (and Elisabeth’s) ear!
Will there be a third Sputnik novel?
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve started planning the third Sputnik novel. The working title is Prima One and it will be told from the point of view of the biomechanoid child Prima, who is the daughter of a junkster and a robot. Due to the time leaps in The Sisters Sputnik, Prima, who is born in an alternate reality called Atomic Shadow Time, grows up in the 1950s, an era unprepared for a child like her. Her guardians are Eufemia and Ralph De Marco from The Sisters Sputnik. They come from the future, so they have foreknowledge of what’s going to happen in the 1960s and 1970s.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing a Steampunk novel called The False Queen’s Archive. It’s sort of Sputnik-adjacent. It’s an epistolary novel made up of everything from interview transcriptions to newspaper clippings to recipes to an unfinished screenplay, offering an alternate history of North America after the War of 1812 in which the United Kingdom manages to regain control of the United States. It features an Italian-Canadian version of Laura Secord. Of course!
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