Speculative Fiction On the Edge of History: An Interview with Terri Favro

Nuclear war, time travel and rewriting reality—Augur interviewed Terri Favro, whose debut novel, Sputnik’s Children, is as fascinating as it is engrossing.

Sputnik’s Children is set in the Niagara region, wedged between the present, Cold War era, and an eerily familiar alternate version of history. Debbie, a famous comic book artist, is tasked with writing her character’s origin story—and in doing so, to go back to her own, stranger-than-fiction origins.

Read on to learn about the story behind the story and Terri’s favourite era to time travel.

Warning: small (very small) spoilers ahead!

What was process like while writing Sputnik’s Children? Did the story find you or did you go looking for it?

The story found me—I’d been living with it for years—but I I had to look for a way to tell it. It could have been nonfiction, or a comic book memoir. At first, I considered writing it as a book about the psychological impact on my generation of growing up in the shadow of the Bomb.

As kids in the Niagara region, we really were “Sputnik’s children.” Our parents and teachers told us that if there were a nuclear war—and the implication was “when” it happened, not “if”—we’d be first to go because of our proximity to the Niagara Falls hydro station, a nuclear first strike target according to Popular Science—and who would doubt them? Take out Niagara in the sixties and you destroy the power grid for entire American eastern seaboard, including Washington.

I’d written some short nonfiction about the experience, in particular an essay called “Snapshots of a Cold War Childhood” that did a compare/contrast of space exploration, nuclear preparedness and my father’s increasingly sophisticated camera and home movie equipment. That was published in a U.K. journal called The Red Line. I’d thought about turning “Snapshots” into a full-length, researched book about the impact of Cold War paranoia on children.

In the end, I decided that the most interesting, entertaining (and honest) way to explore the topic was in fiction. I could go a little wild by blending science, science fiction, comic books and pop culture—all very much part of that time and place.

I think that was how we managed the constant, low-level paranoia of the Cold War—channeling our collective anxiety into superhero stories and ones about the conquest of space. After all, if we blew up the Earth, we could always go live on the Moon, right? Or, Superman or the Silver Surfer would save us.

Your novel has so much in it: alternative history, 1970s nostalgia, interracial romance, satire of corporations, comic book culture! What was the most satisfying part of writing the book?

I had a lot of fun writing about all the topics you mention, but the most satisfying was creating alternate histories that are a slight twist on actual events (or ones that almost happened). For example, in the novel, the second world war never ends: factories are run like armies, with managers given military ranks, and a cadre of women seconded as camp followers called Snugglegirls. 

Sure it’s fiction, but it feels as if it might have been possible. In reality, after World War II, Churchill argued against demobilizing Allied troops since it was likely they’d need to attack their former ally, The Soviet Union, almost immediately. So the never-ending war in Sputnik’s Children might have come true, if Churchill had prevailed.

The novel includes a lot other funhouse mirror versions of history—for example, Nixon committing suicide, Kissinger getting into a fist fight during the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks and SkyLab’s fall to Earth in 1979, triggering a nuclear attack (if it happened to fall on the USSR).

And, of course, I hope readers who remember the Love Canal disaster of the late 1970s in Niagara Falls, New York will see parallels with the irradiated Z-Lands in Sputnik’s Children.

(However, some children from Love Canal actually did grow a third set of teeth or an extra ear—I did not make that up. The idea of the mutants called Exceptionals grew out of that.)

Sometimes when it comes to Cold War history, fact is stranger than fiction, so fact sounds like fiction.

There seem to be multiple “mirrors” in the narrative. Debbie is writing Sputnik Chick, whose origin story is Debbie’s childhood. In turn, you are writing about Debbie who grew up during the Cold War, like you. And like adult Debbie, you co-created a graphic novel. What role do these parallels play for you?

I suppose Debbie turned out to be my comic book alter ego. In some ways, Debbie is like me (I, too, am a fan of wet dirty vodka martinis, I spend a lot of time at the gym, I collaborate on comic books with my artist-husband, Ron Edding, and I have a grandmother who emigrated from Italy to New York and was nicknamed after her dog).

But she’s also my mirror opposite: while Debbie is restless and uncommitted, always up for a one night stand with an appliance repairman or a trip to an Alternate World, I’m more settled, practical, risk-averse and grounded. Debbie is an adventurer at heart: you can’t trust much that she says, including that she’s heartbroken about her separation from the love of her life, Kendal. I, on the other hand, have had a long happy marriage.

Debbie is a lone wolf in a way that I am not. I admire her nerve and independence, though. Her life makes for more interesting reading than mine would.

Another way Debbie’s life and mine strongly intersect is in the geography of our coming-of-age years. Shipman’s Corners is the historical name for my home town of St. Catharines, Ontario, which always felt as American as it did Canadian…therefore the “Industrial-Military Region of CANUSA.”  Just like the real Niagara region, now and then, it’s a place where nationalities and cultures blend and clash, especially in the working class immigrant neighbourhood where I grew up.

Border towns are like that. Many of Debbie’s experiences—and my own—are rooted in the oddness of a region where one “reality” morphs into another.

Reality is slippery in Debbie’s hands. The reader doesn’t know whether to believe her or not. Both timelines seem vividly real. How did it feel to write in this space of unreliability, and how did that affect the way you wrote realism and the speculative?

In terms of Debbie’ s unreliability, I wrote in her voice, always assuming that she believed what she said was true, even if others didn’t. But I tried to create the impression for the reader that she might simply be imagining things. For example, her own sister (in present day) always treats her with a certain impatience. It’s clear others think Debbie is delusional, but she almost never doubts the truth of her own past experiences.

Also the speculative writing (the chapters set in Atomic Mean Team [AMT]) seemed as real to me as the “real” parts of the book in Earth Savings Time. In developing alternative histories for AMT, I stayed close enough to the truth that it should always feel real.

It’s interesting that, the first time I did a reading from the book, I described the way that AMT and other alternate timelines were created. That week, the news was full of the North Korean nuclear tests and Cold War paranoia suddenly seemed fresh again. A man in the audience—old enough to know better—asked me if the scenario described in my book was true. “Well no,” I said. “But I’m glad you thought it was.”

The characters are shadowed by the threat of nuclear disaster, or at best, a dystopian future. How did you write that kind of all-consuming fear without overwhelming the rest of the story?

That’s like asking how anyone who grew up under the Bomb wasn’t overwhelmed by fear, all the time, in real life. Actually I think we were, but  we internalized it. Life went on.

I remember that time being infused with a happy, over-lit, candy-coloured Disney optimism that seemed conjured up to mitigate the anxiety children felt about nuclear bombs.

If I could reduce it to a what-if question: How can a generation (mine) that grew up expecting to die in a nuclear Armageddon not be fucked up? How did we live day to day life knowing that death or a horribly irradiated future (genetic mutations, radiation sickness, nuclear winter) could fall out of a clear blue sky without enough warning to escape?

Really, there was no escape. It’s amazing that baby boomers, especially from border towns, are not even more screwed up. I do think, though, that it probably goes some way toward explaining helicopter parenting, and our habit of overmedicating and over-insuring ourselves: we crave comfort, progress and safety, yet we’re also convinced that unseen disaster lurks everywhere.

So, I guess the reason the threat doesn’t overwhelm the story is that it didn’t overwhelm real life during the Cold War, although I think it had a deeper and more damaging effect on human psychology than we care to think about, especially in the young.

How much science went into the fiction? How did you reconcile the two in the novel?

The many-worlds theory of the quantum physicist Hugh Everett III was introduced to me by my editor at ECW, Jen Hale. I used some of the ideas Everett and his followers proposed, including that there are many timelines or “worlds” and that “closely coupled worlds” might even be able to pick up television transmissions from one another.

But I departed from Everett by proposing that these worlds were only created after the first atomic bomb detonation in 1944—the Trinity blast—and that each detonation since then calves a new alternate world. So, I used some theoretical science but twisted it to my own fictional ends.

Exceptionals, the mutants who result from the nuclear war of 1979 in Atomic Mean Time, are fictional creations but I think likely believable, considering the impact on DNA by radiation.

When Debbie hops through time, she’s obviously doing it through some neurochemical means—The Trespasser administers an injection the first time she time-travels. It sounds more scientific than getting into some type of time machine, given the rise of nanotechnology.  I’m hoping that the reader can suspend disbelief just a bit in those sections.

I did a lot of reading about astronauts’ experiences on space walks— something Debbie does just before she breaks through to Earth Savings Time. I tried to make this as believable as possible, without going to space myself. (I’m prone to motion sickness so that would not go well.)

I also carefully researched the problems faced by SkyLab and what caused it to fall.

If you could go back or forward in time, where would you go and what would you do?

Tempted as I am to find out whether the Walt Disney promise of moon colonies finally comes true a hundred or so year from now, I don’t have the guts to go forward in time, given what’s happening in the world right now. I’d also be worried about dying almost immediately due to lack of immunity to viruses that have mutated since 2018.

So, despite the fact that women’s clothes and lives were even more uncomfortable in the past, I’d head for the early-to-mid 1920s. Milan and New York. I want to see my grandparents meet, fall in love and ship out for Ellis Island. Check out the truth behind some of the suspiciously sketchy stories I heard about their adventures at sea.

Or possibly head to pre-Code Hollywood to make my way as a wisecracking, gin swilling “lady screenwriter.” Maybe I’d write a silent movie scenario based on Sputnik’s Children.

After all, the 1920s was the era that saw the rise of pulp science fiction magazines and films like Metropolis, with its sexy evil robot protagonist. If I could write those types of stories, and get into the illegal gin joints, I’d be pretty happy in 1923.

Are there writers, established or new, you would love to have more people read?

If I were the book curator of the multiverse, I’d recommend the Finnish fantasy writer Johanna Sinisalo. Her style of writing has been described as “Finnish weird.” Her novel The Core of the Sun is like a Finnish punk version of The Handmaid’s Tale with a smattering of Southern American magic realism.

I’d also love to see everyone read the debut novel of Canadian author and journalist Omar El Akkad, American War, which astonished, terrified and dazzled me. It’s about a second American Civil War (at the end of the 21^st century) and the “creation” of a terrorist. I found it gut-wrenching. I look forward with admiration and naked jealousy to what he writes next.

Also—although she’s already widely read—if you haven’t discovered the novels of Louise Erdrich, you’re missing out on a rich, deep, hilarious, heartbreaking, mystical body of work. What I love about her books is that she combines social realism, magic realism, plain old magic, spirituality, colonialism, myths, Indigenous stories, humour, drama and pop cult. I think Erdrich’s many novels could be read as “one big story” all set in her North Dakota Ojibway community.

That’s something I’m also trying to do in my own writing—focus on the ever expanding stories that come out of a particular community and group of people. One big story!

Terri Favro is a novelist, essayist, comic book collaborator and copywriter. Her novel Sputnik’s Children was a Globe100, CBC Books Top 10, and Quill & Quire recommended novel for 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She is the author of two other novels and a nonfiction book about robot-human relationships. Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario, Terri now lives in Toronto and online at terrifavro.ca.