"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外文書商品之書封，為出版社提供之樣本。實際出貨商品，以出版社所提供之現有版本為主。部份書籍，因出版社供應狀況特殊，匯率將依實際狀況做調整。
無庫存之商品，在您完成訂單程序之後，將以空運的方式為你下單調貨。為了縮短等待的時間，建議您將外文書與其他商品分開下單，以獲得最快的取貨速度，平均調貨時間為1~2個月。
為了保護您的權益，「三民網路書店」提供會員七日商品鑑賞期(收到商品為起始日)。
若要辦理退貨，請在商品鑑賞期內寄回，且商品必須是全新狀態與完整包裝(商品、附件、發票、隨貨贈品等)否則恕不接受退貨。
