Now then, pay attention: Adam Roberts is to para-literary criticism as Stewart Lee is to comedy.

In a recent interview, Lee explains how he’s taken deliberate steps over the last decade to create a situation where his audience comes to him on his own terms, rather than on anyone else’s expectations or promises. This included tactics such as embellishing tour posters with negative reviews alongside positive ones—this worked well for the late Iain Banks in the first paperback run of The Wasp Factory, if you recall—and repeatedly framing his work as being “aimed at middle-class, white, liberal Guardian readers”, which (so Lee claims) has the counter-intuitive effect of making all sorts of other types of people turn up, because people are quite fond of defying other people who tell them whether or not they should like a thing.

Of course, there’s a difference between postmodern stand-up comedy on one hand, and writing (admittedly postmodern) reviews of (not often but occasionally postmodern) science fiction and fantasy novels on the other. Actually, there are lots of differences—so let’s just say that Lee and Roberts are similar in that they have both created an audience for their work which has no leverage over the direction or tone that the work takes. They are rebels, cocky malcontents, the scruffy transit-van-bands of their milieus: happy to work hard and merely scrape by, if that means they get to play only the stuff that really moves them, man.

Now, Roberts has a day-job as an actual professional Professor of literature, which frees him from singing for his reviewer’s supper; he’s also a prolific and perennially misapprehended novelist, so he knows what it’s like when the reviewing boot’s on the other foot, so to speak. This is why, for me at least, the “guerilla” reviews within Sibilant Fricative are the most interesting and enjoyable, as they’re unrestrained by expectations and protocol—a little like Speaker Bercow decamping to the Groucho Club in order to dispense all the toothsome bon mots that the Woolsack cannot bear, perhaps.

Roberts ranges wide in his reading and in his responses, showing off an intense engagement with any and every text that keeps your attention even when you suspect the text itself would not—I never thought I’d read an entire essay on Tolkein’s unfinished experiments in Anglo-Saxon verse styles, for instance. And so, surrounding a couple of serious commissioned pieces on Philip K Dick and some more reverent readings of J.R.R, we largely find the acrobatics and mummery that “proper” criticism—academic or otherwise—is supposed to forsake. He grins, he laughs, he scowls, he scolds; he raises the roof, he chews the furniture; wild exaggeration gives way to blunt understatement; chin-stroking cogitation flips over into schoolyard silliness; literary modes are veered between, styles collide, and internet-native tactics are brought to bear: the overextended metaphor-ad-absurdam; the bizarre yet strangely apposite similes; the over-long semicolon’d list of phenomena; and, of course, the puns. (Dear god, the puns.)

But my very favourite quality of Roberts’s roguish reviews is perhaps best hinted at by a series of questions that might be asked by an aggrieved fan of the works under consideration. “Why,” one might ask, “would one write such a fruitily exaggerated and maximalist review of Ian Watson’s (legendarily de-canon’d) Warhammer 40,000 tie-in novel? Why would one write so many extensive, wheezingly over-detailed and dutiful instalments of an assessment of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series? Why wax lyrical in imitation of Greer Gilman’s prose in Cloud and Ashes, only to mock the dialogue through mimicry? Why respond to Connie Willis’s tendency to anachronistic infodumping with a nit-picky list of corrections to such?”

(It might help if I remind you that the jester gets away with saying the otherwise unsayable in the presence of the court, precisely because his foolish comportment and merry mimicry easily convince those who are seduced only by surfaces to discount the substance of his speech.)

As such, Sibilant Fricative embodies a solid arguments in favour of the negative review as a vital component of literary discourse, and as a literary art-form in its own right: amidst the conformity of late-late capitalist culture, any deviation from the purely pedestrian, whether “good” or “bad”, deserves to be discussed in as engaging a manner as possible. Indeed, that’s how novelties like the novel itself—initially dismissed as French frippery, y’know—make their way to the attention of the wider public, through coverage positive and negative alike. It’s almost as if most people prefer to read other opinions and then make up their minds for themselves, in a sort of cheery defiance of people who tell them whether or not they should like a thing.

People, eh? Tsk.