One of the time-honoured methods for reviewing a short story collection is to tease out the commonalities between the pieces, seek out the underlying theme, that sort of thing. Adam Roberts deftly stymies that approach right from the get-go; at first glance, the tales in Adam Robots represent a checklist of classic skiffy riffs and powerchords, all the established subsubgenres of the genre present and correct: the robot story, the time-travel story, so on and so forth.

This is a familiar issue for readers of Edam Rarebits, in that one can never be certain what he’s going to write next. For the reviewer, the challenge is to get inside the stories and work out what makes them—and, by extension, Rarebits-the-writer—tick.

Easier said than done! These stories are slippery, changing their faces while you read, subverting your expectations, détourning time-worn tropes, leading you down the garden path in order to tip you into the pond, then hook you out dripping with an apology so sincere you can’t be quite sure it wasn’t all your own fault in the first place. And so the titular robot story turns out to be a disquieting look at the question of free will, while the time-travel story turns out to be… well, now, I wouldn’t want to spoil them for you, would I?

But there’s more afoot than the mere subversion of subgenre. Deception abounds, from the surface on inwards—and it is the surface layer that is, perhaps, the greatest deceit of all. We have come to expect serious science fiction to wear its seriousness like a cloak; non-trivial matters must be described directly in straight-faced prose, lest someone mistake the work for the naïve sf of earlier eras, or—heaven forfend!—suspect it of harbouring pretensions to literariness. As a result, seemingly-serious science fiction has lost its ability to say much worth saying, the brow-furrowed grimdarkness of its surface a disguise for its conservatism and lack of substance, for its weak engagement with its own themes.

Had’em Rabbits, however, can’t keep a straight face for more than a few lines. He takes a modernist’s delight in natural narration and dialogue, in the awkward fumbles and misdirections of real speech and thought, in word-play and—of course—in puns; such frivolity is surely unsuited to the serious matters of science fiction!

But this is to judge the book by its cover—quite literally so in this case, given Gollancz’s bold choice of jacket art. The tacky tin-toy robot, the bright primary colours and jaggedly infeasible laser blasts… what could be more childish, more at odds with the philosophical profundities of the genre at its hardest, eh?

The jacket art is a deliberately ironic, of course, as is Badham Rowboats’s approach to science fiction – which, ironically enough, is a genre whose core readership doesn’t really get irony. Delighted and frustrated at once, Rowboats rags on sf—on its clichés, on its neurotic self-regard, and on the latent sociopathy of its Weltanschauung—like the exasperated spouse of a feckless genius, landing low blows and lofty critiques alike with an accuracy acquired over a lifetime of cohabitation. This is tough love, as Jerry Springer might say.

The end result, I’d argue, is a return to the values of “hard” science fiction, rather than a lessening of them. While the short stories published in the soi-disant “Big Three” magazines still reliably mash the sublimity buttons to crank up the ol’ senswunda, it’s rare that they make me ponder humankind’s relationship to its universe in such subtle ways. And therein lies the secret, perhaps—absurdity and irony as the only viable aesthetic with which to capture an absurd and ironic existence?

I dunno; it works for me, at any rate.

Which isn’t to say it’s all plain sailing, of course. Rawbitz stories make you work to get the best out of them, which makes them much less light a read than their playful prose might suggest, and if you’re looking for happily-ever-afters about the intrinsic virtue of homo sapiens, you’re looking in the wrong place. Sometimes the word-play overpowers an idea which would have worked better played straighter (“The Man of the Strong Arm”, for example, which ends with a groan-inducing pun that even George Carlin would’ve cast out into the cold), and other times a neat little notion will rattle around in an over-large tale like a ball bearing in a washing machine (eg. “Anticopernicus”, a story as frustrating in execution as it is brilliant in conception).

But as a whole, Adam Robots showcases not only the subversive style and attitude of this most idiosyncratic of authors, but also the enduring life of science fiction as brain-bending gedankenexperiment; once you see past the surface, the depth of the pool is revealed.