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The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

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The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists is a neglected classic in the same type, and of a quality with the Hitchhikers; Guide to the Galaxy--but preceding it in publication or radio production by at least two years (as with Philip Jose Farmers' Venus of the Half-Shell"). Here are four novelettes set in the very far future featured in Covers' Autumn Angels and East Wind Coming--where a godlike Humanity is presented with the essential emptiness of existence, the tawdriness of the ambitions they thinly stretch across this emptiness--the games they play to make their infinite possibilities fit their quotidian understanding of themselves and their possibilities--all against the thinest, yet somehow less-dismissible possibility that true love canwarm and light the empty darkness--and the possibility that it can only make things much more richly and fully worse.
In the title story, the protagonist wins a ping-pong game of cosmic importance for a chance to see how the spirit of his dead beloved has fared in the now State-arbitrated afterlife; the Armadillo of Destruction has a love-teseract between an immortal if obese Goddess of Love, a zombie/cyborg space probe seeking meaning in what he/it thinks might be love, and the avatar/stooge of the semi-divine eponymous Armadillo, who has become a sort of pre-Star war Darth Vader after his old obsession, chess, went from Platonic to pornographic in his best-known matches--except weirder and wittier than a synopsis can hope to convey; the weakest piece, the Armadillo of Despair features a twentieth-century hard-boiled gumshoe blown into the Imortallized future and confronted with a master of telepathic therapy who cannot root out the despair in his rather gothic house-hold of motherless daughters replete with haunted neighboring estates--here Cover goes for the pay-off fairly straightforwardly and his usual game of shifting panels and rubbed-through layers is somewhat missed in what is still the most precise and therefore one-lining closer in the set; and the Clam of Catastrophe features a future Holmes and Watson trying to solve the appeal of the suddenly-re-emergent fad of Sexism in a romp which has not references but honest-to-god re-imaginings of three or four of the most significant moments in Doyles' canon--along with a scene of Holmes at a Discotheque, boogeying down on the floor and the jamming with the band on his violin to woo something much too like the Goddess of Love--and them some.
His immortals, in their omnipotent banality, are a competent match for Moorcocks Dancers at the End of time; less exotic and alien, but not missing the increased opportunity to comment on the human condition.
Cover does not quite have Adams' sense of frivolity, but he more than matches it with a sense of story telling, that is never funnier than when it proves to have been multi-layered and subtle--and you can never be sure what game Cover is up to until the chess-pieces are moving--and if he lacks some of Adam's easy laughter it is because he takes longer, perhaps a more authentic look at what most laughter is meant to cover. Even more than Adams, his sense of the ridiculous derives not from some prime-time slapstick but from a keen awareness of what really is ridiculous yet common everywhere.
Platypus shares this with Farmers' Venus--I am lead to believe that this is exactly why the Hitchhikers Guide series has gotten nearly all of the notice of this entire movement.

I read this book about 30 years ago. It's very whimsical. I would rate it as fantasy rather than science fiction. As I recall, it is four short stories, only loosely connected. The plots are a little dark, so don't expect happy endings, but it is entertaining. Oddly enough, the four titles are what amused me the most. I believe that they are the Platypus of Doom, the Aardvark of Despair, the Armadillo of Destruction, and the Clam of Catastrophe.