Every year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) does this book debate called Canada Reads. Out of a long list of fifteen books, five are selected by semi-famous people (Canadian), and they debate and defend their book as to why it is the one book every Canadian should read that year. Each day over the week of debates in March, a book is voted out by the panelists until we are left with the winner. It is rare for a work of speculative fiction to make the long list, never mind make it to the debates, so when one does make the list, I get a bit excited, thinking that finally speculative fiction might finally be getting some national respect. This year, two works of speculative fiction made the long list. Yep, two books. Talk about a leap for mankind! Radicalized by Cory Doctorow is one, and Sputnik’s Children by Terri Favro was the other. Radicalized made the short list, Sputnik’s Children did not. But it was also nominated for the Sunburst Award, a juried award for speculative fiction in Canada. My interest was piqued.
Sputnik’s Children (2017)
Written by: Terri Favro
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 360 (Paperback)
Publisher: ECW Press
The Premise:
Cult comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi has been riding the success of her Cold War era-inspired superhero series, Sputnik Chick: Girl with No Past, for more than 25 years. But with the comic book losing fans and Debbie struggling to come up with new plotlines for her badass, mutant-killing heroine, she decides to finally tell Sputnik Chick’s origin story.
Debbie’s never had to make anything up before and she isn’t starting now. Sputnik Chick is based on Debbie’s own life in an alternate timeline called Atomic Mean Time. As a teenager growing up in Shipman’s Corners — a Rust Belt town voted by Popular Science magazine as “most likely to be nuked” — she was recruited by a self-proclaimed time traveller to collapse Atomic Mean Time before an all-out nuclear war grotesquely altered humanity. In trying to save the world, Debbie risked obliterating everyone she’d ever loved — as well as her own past — in the process.
Or so she believes . . . Present-day Debbie is addicted to lorazepam and dirty, wet martinis, making her an unreliable narrator, at best. A time-bending novel that delves into the origin story of the Girl with No Past, Sputnik’s Children explores what it was like to come of age in the Atomic Age.
There will be spoilers ahead.
Discussion: Debbie, the main character of Sputnik’s Children, is the creator of a comic book called Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past, and Sputnik’s Children is Debbie telling us Sputnik Chick’s origin story. Debbie claims that she is Sputnik Chick, that she grew up in an alternate universe where World War II never really ended, that there were dozens of domino wars, and the manufacture of atomic bombs was widespread. This alternate universe is referred to as Earth Atomic Time and features all kinds of wonderful minor alterations from our timeline that we see as we watch Debbie grow up. Nixon is President and Bobby Kennedy is his Vice-President, Disney has a dark edge to their animation featuring atomic bombs, Studio 54 has a red carpet instead of a purple one, and so on.
Debbie believes that she was tasked by a man she calls the Trespasser to take all of humanity with her from Earth Atomic Time to Earth Standard Time to save us all from nuclear extinction. And so, on the eve of the nuclear war, she does just that, and passes out. When she wakes up, she is in Earth Standard Time, and no one remembers her or anything of Earth Atomic Time. Even her family believes she died at thirteen.
Debbie, then, becomes an unreliable narrator. She says her past, Sputnik Chick’s past, is true, but no one else remembers it. As a reader, we question the veracity of what she is telling us. She says that she has to remain the same weight she was when she crossed into Earth Standard Time because otherwise she will mess up the space-time continuum. Do we believe her? Well, she says she gained weight once and lost a baby toe as a result, so maybe. While the debate over the reality of Debbie’s tale seems to get resolved at the end, it is a weak plot line on which to hang the story, and it really does hang on it. This isn’t really Sputnik Chick’s origin story, it’s Debbie’s.
This kind of storytelling irritates me. I can handle unreliable narrators. I love a good mystery/thriller where we’re asking “did they?” or “didn’t they?”. But I hate when the author tells a story as if it actually happened to the main character, then flip-flops to say that all the action is quite possibly just a dream or all in the main character’s imagination, so that neither the reader, nor the main character/narrator knows if the story is real or not. I don’t care how implausible the plot is; if the author does a good enough job to convince me that the characters are capable and reasonable in their actions and makes me believe them, that as impossible as the plot would be to me, it could have happened the way it was written. It is a game, on the part of the author, to seem more clever than the reader, and that violates every level of trust the reader has placed in the author.
Do I believe in time travel and alternate universes? Not particularly, but I enjoy those kinds of stories, so I’m going to pick up a science fiction book with those elements in it. In science fiction, I’ve already made the leap to believe that it is possible in the world the author has created.
I wish Favro hadn’t gone down that road. I am a child of the Cold War. In recent years I’ve often, largely jokingly, said how I almost miss the Cold War era. I miss that the global conflict was ideological over communism or capitalism. I don’t miss the fear of the imminent mutually-assured destruction of all-out nuclear war. The fear was real when I was growing up. Favro does a wonderful job of eliciting that fear of the Cold War, the Atomic Age. The world she creates is colorful, dark, rich, full of details, and true emotions of love and fear.
In Conclusion: I think Sputnik’s Children plays well to the Canadian Literary crowd, which tends to enjoy stories about the mundanities of every day life. Sputnik’s Children is just that, a story of Debbie growing up enjoying comic books, with the exception that she is growing up in an alternate Earth timeline. I also think there is enough of the alternate world and time travel to appeal to the speculative fiction readership. As a whole, I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the alternate world, growing up with Debbie in this alternate timeline in the nuclear age. It would have been more appealing to read it simply as a tale of her origin without the guessing game for myself and for Debbie, of “it is all real, or is it all in her head?”
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