(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
A digital preview copy of Space Brooms! provided by Angry Robot Books in return for an honest and objective review; the novel releases 29 April 2025.
When I switched on the phone to read the graciously suppled preview pdf of Space Brooms! by A. G. Rodriguez, I was desperately, for reasons not worth divulging, in need of a good, nay GREAT, sci-fi romp.
The kind that takes you racing across solar systems and between galaxies, that is avuncularly playful as it deadly serious and full of potential doom, and which does some gloriously enrapturing world-building and fills it with characters you want on your side in all their flawed wonder.
Rather happily, actually joyfully, Space Brooms! delivers all that, and so much more, a space opera that knows how to ratchet up the tension, upend lives and rebuild them again, and which gets that even in the bleakest of moments, that there can be moments of real connection and humanity.
Not that Johnny Gomez, a janitor on Kilgore space station, knows much about what it means to be connected to other people, save for his roommate, dockworker Rygar, having left his home of Luna (the new name for earth’s moon) far behind about a decade before.
He spends his days covered in alien excrement and dealing with a difficult boss and wishing, praying, daydreaming of a life where adventure rules and he saves the galaxy as a routine part of his day, preferably with a beautiful woman by his side (there’s one in particular named Lisette whom he sees far off in the station and she is his co-fighter and lover and the promise of a world where he means something).
My alarm sounded and I woke with a start. At one time, the gentle plucking of a harp accompanied by a flutter of flutes and other woodwinds immediately comforted me upon my return to consciousness. Now it only grated against my eardrums and provoked any number of groans, moans and curses. I knew I could easily change the tone in the setting menu on my glass-comm, but never did; it was a perfect analogy for how hopeless I felt.
But in a case of be careful what you wish for – like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope, dreams have a way of becoming something else than what you envisaged and what the hell do you do then? – a series of events, in a shit-filled toiler one day (let’s just say that some of the aliens in Space Brooms!, and good lord there are a variety, all imaginatively brought to life, have explosive ways of getting ride of their faecal matter), lead him to a spaceship called the Mentirosa, a crew of smugglers and a dangerous ride through the best and worst the galaxy has to offer.
It’s the discovery in all that shit of a small glass data chit, which looks like nothing but which turns out to be everything, which changes his life wholly and completely, as every nefarious being in the galaxy, including the Obinna Syndicate, the nastiest organised criminals around, races after him, rather viciously it should be noted, to get what’s on that sliver of glass.
Thankfully, just at the moment life on Kilgore goes from scatalogically uneventful to full-bore, adrenalised mental, Johnny is rescued by the aforementioned smugglers – Hooper, Cai and yes, Lisette; technically Lisette is reluctantly along for the ride, with the events that change Johnny’s life also smashing hers to smithereens – and they take him far away, they hope, from all the trouble and to find someone who will pay them a pretty credit, or 37 million or so, for the troublesome chit.
(courtesy official author page)
Of course, the whole getting away from trouble thing doesn’t quite pan out, thankfully for the imaginatively fun-filled, action-infused narrative of Space Brooms!, and Johnny and his new friends, who quickly become a kind of found family, find themselves running and running, and yes, running, from all kinds of nasty beings, many of whom meant Johnny painful physical harm.
Thank goodness for fast-acting future medical tech because without it Johnny would resemble John McClane at the end of Die Hard, a bloodied punching bag for people who want nothing more than the valuable data on the chit and who don’t care, not even a little bit, how they get it.
While being peoples’ punching bag isn’t fun, it does provide some moments of wisecracking levity in Space Brooms!, a novel which neatly balances the badassery of a galaxy technically ruled by a Star Trek-like federation which turns a blind eye to crime if it keeps the peace, with the fun of blockbuster-level adventure and the humanity and fun of finding yourself unexpectedly in a caring and eminently capable found family.
Like any space opera with a heart and soul, Space Brooms! really flies, quite literally, on the back of the repartee between the four new crewmembers, drawing much of its emotional charge from the way in which they have each other’s backs and how they discover that the real power in the galaxy is giving a damn about someone else.
Hooper stopped and dropped his head with a sigh upon spotting the clamp. The rest of us stopped behind him and stared out at the Mentirosa. He put a hand up to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
‘Doesn’t look like we’ll be going anywhere in your baby,’ Lisette said in the most unamused tone I had ever heard.
In the middle of all this raucous and bloodied adventuring, Johnny also has to come to grips with his painful past, one shared, at least obliquely with Lisette who might be the object of Johnny’s romantic and heroic fantasies but who, while she likes him as a friend, isn’t inclined to see him as anything more than that.
So, yes, there’s a form of blunt-forced trauma in Space Brooms! too, and it works because Rodriguez is adept at delivering up brilliant turbocharged action while keeping the humanity of what’s happening to the main characters, and even some of the supporting ones, front and centre.
It’s a gift and Rodriguez uses it to impressive effect in a novel that knows that while pressing the pedal to the spaceship metal makes for an energetic and feverishly engaging space romp, that you also need to give a damn about who’s in the middle of the action for it to mean anything, while you’re reading the book and afterwards when you muse and think upon it (and as you can see, this reader has done just that).
Alive with imaginative world-building, fulsomely delivered characters who capture your heart, make you laugh and make you want to stick around for what happens next, Space Brooms! is a fantastically funny, tension-filled and imaginative race through a galaxy that might want what’s on the chit but which in its pursuit helps those it is pursuing to figure out what really matters to them and to hold onto that for everything they’re worth.