The Quantum Pirate & The 7 Rules of Life

'A steeping in noir and crime story fiction colors most of Cover’s major sf writing, and in both The Quantum Pirate and The 7 Rules of Life, the most delightful characters are the most ruthless.... Here, we find chaos struggling to assert itself. It’s as if a small, cunning animal-like a fox, say-has gotten lost in a vast ground-meat factory, and is trying to get at the enticing ground meat without becoming ground meat itself, stepping sinuously to avoid the chewing steel teeth.'The prose framing these tales reminds me somewhat of certain works by Jack Vance, and, even more, of James Branch Cabell. Like Cabell, Cover offers a fusion of adventure and satire, humor and potent theme. Like Cabell, Cover has a command of the omniscient voice; unlike Cabell he can segue into prose approaching Raymond Chandler; a truly unjarring smooth move from the omniscient voice to the earthily subjective. And it works; it works eerily well. How does Cover do it? He can write like Melville or Bukowsky in the same novel, and it’s all of a piece. With wit, with bold sentence structure, with that remarkable ability to make the general pregnant with the particular, Cover carries us into the delicious world of his imagination.'His symbols are potent, inherently ironic, and always entertaining. Consider this passage from The Quantum Pirate in which Coppeweb, the very personification of a trapped bureaucrat, living an endless life of being literally fixed in place at his work station, gets the courage to set himself free by pressing a certain red button. A red button he’s never really supposed to use. Now, this set-up, this predicament, is not uncommon in literature-think of EM Forster. A man is horribly bound into the social machine in some way, and it’s painful to break free. Suddenly we find that we are on Coppeweb’s side, even though he’s gone a bit mad for a woman who is perhaps one of the most dangerous females in the galaxy...'What wicked enchantment you have ahead of you,! Just trust him, give him control, let him mesmerize you, soothe you...then enjoy the ride as he startles and even disorients you. Yet the internal logic of The Quantum Pirate and The 7 Rules of Life is watertight. You won’t drown, I promise! So with luck-you’ll still be sane when you finish reading this book. But if you’re not quite as 'sane', after...you may well be glad of it.'-John Shirley, author A Splendid Chaos