A Spectre Is Haunting Texas
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Spectre is Haunting Texas is a science fiction novel by Fritz Leiber, first published as a novel in 1969. It was originally published as a three-part serial in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction in 1968. The title appears to be based on a Karl Marx quote from The Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting Europe...the spectre of communism."
Plot summary
Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz is an actor, fortune seeker and adventurer from the long isolated orbital technocratic democracies of Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries. He lands in what he believes to be Canada to reclaim family mining interests only to discover that Canada is now North Texas and what is left of civilization in North America is ruled by primitive, backslapping, bigger than life anti-intellectual "good ole boys" convinced of their own moral superiority.
In the tortured version of history known to the giant hormone-boosted Anglo-Saxon inhabitants who rule a diminutive Mexican underclass, the original Texas, or Texas, had actually secretly ruled the pre-nuclear war United States since 1845.
Texas escaped the nuclear destruction of the rest of the United States because of the foresight of Lyndon the First. An enormous bunker then known as the Houston Carlsbad Caverns-Denver-Kansas City-Little Rock Pentagram and now referred to simply as the Texas Bunker had saved the heartland during a war that destroyed both American coasts, Europe, Russia, China, and Africa. Texas then conquered the rest of the continent, although Hawaii and Cuba remain stubbornly "unconquered".
Release details
- Fritz Leiber. 1968, 1969, 1971. A Specter is Haunting Texas. Galaxy Science Fiction, Walker, Bantam.
