Terri Favro’s Sputnik’s Children opens with a scene that I suspect will be familiar to a lot of creative people. Comic book author Debbie Biondi is at a convention, surrounded by people wearing costumes to look like characters from her series about the Girl with No Past, when two fans start telling her what she should do with her series and point out what they think is wrong with it. This would be irritating to any creator, but it’s especially irritating to Debbie because she is the Girl without a Past. Of course, she can’t tell anyone that the story is based on her life in another timeline because no one will believe her.
Sputnik’s Children moves back and forth between two timelines. In Earth Standard Time, Debbie is a comic book writer and artist with a series that’s losing popularity. Strangely, however, she doesn’t have a credit history or documents to prove that she’s a Canadian citizen. She can only use cash. This doesn’t seem to slow her down. What does slow her down is her loneliness, because she is one of the few people who has memories of Atomic Standard Time, where she really came from. In Atomic Mean Time, the Cold War was considerably hotter, with multiple missile crises. The ground is polluted and people are increasingly born with mutations. It might have been awful, but it was home for Debbie.
As the plot moves forward in both timelines, we see what Debbie’s fans would give various limbs for: the origin story of the Girl with No Past. Debbie Biondi is not particularly special. She doesn’t have abilities, even after a close call in a contaminated field. And yet, visitors from the future are sure that she will be the one to save everyone when the Big One hits in 1979. They mention something about swinging Schrödinger’s cat, but that’s the only thing the visitors say about how she’s supposed to save the world.
The actual life of a hero, as we learn in Sputnik’s Children, is much less glamorous than their lives in the comic books. It’s easy to see why, considering what Debbie had to give up and what she had to do. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a sad book. Rather, it’s a sort of adventure with a melancholy streak. I really enjoyed it’s meditation on heroism and the private lives of heroes when the spotlight is off them.