Description

PLEASE NOTE: You are purchasing a preorder for this title, which is scheduled to release on August 25th, 2026. All efforts will be made to have the paperback arrive to customers before that date. 

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Smitty just wanted a quiet night. Instead, he woke up strapped to a table on an alien spaceship, staring at two exhausted extraterrestrials whose memory-wipe machine had run out of juice. Now they have a problem. And Smitty, a wandering bartender with itchy feet and nothing to lose, has an opportunity.

Dropped off at Goulaub Station—a crossroads space habitat teeming with spindly Breelo, purple hexapods, three-headed commuters, and one exceptionally cranky rock-skinned thug—Smitty needs a job, an air tag, and a way to stay ahead of the local law. What he really needs is a bar. Because if there’s one thing the galaxy has in common with Earth, it’s that everybody, everywhere, needs someone to listen while they complain about their boss, their spouse, and the price of alien beer.

Armed with a lifetime of pouring drinks, an ear for human (and inhuman) nature, and a stubborn refusal to stay put, Smitty sets out to open the first Earth-style bar in known space. But between cutthroat competition, corrupt station officials, a soda monster, a jailbreak, and his very own revolution, running a bar in an interstellar port city turns out to be a lot more complicated than mixing A into B and stirring.

Warm, witty, and packed with the barroom philosophy of a narrator who’s seen it all—on Earth and beyond—this is a rollicking science fiction comedy in the tradition of Douglas Adams, John Scalzi, and Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Place.

Pull up a stool. First round’s on the house.