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A Spectre Is Haunting Texas

3.4 of 5 stars 3.40 · rating details · 138 ratings · 10 reviews

A Spectre is Haunting Texas is a Fritz Leiber novel, 1st appearing as a book in '69, originally published as a 3-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction in '68.
Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz is an actor, fortune seeker & adventurer from the isolated orbital technocratic democracies of Circumluna & the Bubbles Congeries. He lands in what he believes to be Canada...more

Hardcover, 245 pages

Published 1969 by Victor Gollancz (first published 1968)

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Aug 31, 2009 R. Burns rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Any one liking Texas, hippies, actors and space opera

Originally, I read this book sometime in the early 1970s, the best I can recall. For those of you who are sci-fi aficionados (I'm not sure I am myself) this was the time of lots of small independent publishing houses that allowed quite a bit of experimentation in the genre.

First the blurb: The protagonist and first person narrator is a Mr. Christopher Crockett Del le Cruz is a denizen of the Sack, a bubble of space station the size of small asteroid that orbits the moon. Time is a couple of hund...more Originally, I read this book sometime in the early 1970s, the best I can recall. For those of you who are sci-fi aficionados (I'm not sure I am myself) this was the time of lots of small independent publishing houses that allowed quite a bit of experimentation in the genre.

First the blurb: The protagonist and first person narrator is a Mr. Christopher Crockett Del le Cruz is a denizen of the Sack, a bubble of space station the size of small asteroid that orbits the moon. Time is a couple of hundred years in the future, after WWIII, and Del le Cruz is a thin, an extremely thin human, more selected by near zero gravity to be nearly 8 feet tall. Del Le Cruz is on a mission to Earth to save his family's thespian company. Earth is open to visitors for the first time in a century or so and he's there to take claim to some mineral rights in order to save the company from disbandment by the more technical and puritan minded leadership of the Sack.

Upon landing (in Dallas) he is surprised to find the surviving Texans, the anglo-Texans, that is, have mutated themselves to also be 8 feet tall. They are fascists through and through, and have a subjugate the Hispanic population and mutated them as well to all be under 5 foot tall. Texas now stretches into Canada. There Tulsa, Texas, Kansas City, Texas, and so on. Politics are a matter of the laser pistol, and Texas women are kept at home or dabbling in the arts where they belong, says the Governor of Texas. It's all ge-haw, and ge-haw this, with Del Le Cruz playing the part of a honorable Texan -- despite his ethnic heritage -- one moment and a snake-oil salesman the next. High melodramatic drama and a revolution ensue.

Okay, so in 1969 Fritz Leiber, himself the son of actors, missed it a bit predicting WWIII and the frying of most of Earth's population. But when I read the book in the 1970s, I didn't know he was the son of actors. (Thanks Wikipedia) or that it was his first novel, the best I can tell, after his wife died in the mid 1960s. Leiber went on a three-year drunk (thanks again Wikipedia) and didn't write much, which says a lot about the myth of alcohol being a writing muse.

All in all, it's one of those novels that remind me how I got hooked on sci-fi. It's not so much about technology, but the mutability of humans and human culture. We are so easily re-wired mentally by our culture, and our culture is to some degree a factorial of our technology.

You can find more aobut lost gems of sci-fi on my blog at http://unselfishgene.com/blog/?p=84

Robert B.(less)

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Jun 05, 2011 Perry Whitford rated it 2 of 5 stars

A skeleton-like man from the moon arrives on a future, post nuclear fall-out North America which has become dominated by hormonally enhanced Texans eight feet tall, who subjugate a shrunken class of Mexican helots to keep them in power.
As that introduction should prepare you for, complete nonsense ensues.

For some reason I entered into this book with the perception that it was going to be a meditative, literary piece, but that was far from the case!
It's a hokey, silly story, with stupid, frivol...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Erik Graff rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Leiber fans

Recommended to Erik by: a Three Oaks bibliophile

Back in 1973, the parents having just divorced and me home from college for the summer, I decided to get my eight-years younger brother out of Chicago and away from our depressed father for a few months by bundling him off with me and my friend Martin to the family cottage in Michigan. I got enough work as a gardener for a couple of wealthy couples down the beach to pay the bills by working twenty hours a week and the three of us settled down to a season of sun, sand . . . and more sun and sand....more Back in 1973, the parents having just divorced and me home from college for the summer, I decided to get my eight-years younger brother out of Chicago and away from our depressed father for a few months by bundling him off with me and my friend Martin to the family cottage in Michigan. I got enough work as a gardener for a couple of wealthy couples down the beach to pay the bills by working twenty hours a week and the three of us settled down to a season of sun, sand . . . and more sun and sand.

Life in the country without television, stereo and the modern conveniences got boring. Brother Fin found a few friends and would be gone all day. Martin and I would punctuate the "idiocy of rural life" (Marx) with rides through the area in his white Galaxy 500, checking out the sights, looking for bookstores.

On the road from Sawyer to Three Oaks, Michigan, we found a bookstore of a sort owned by an engaging old fellow who made his living in retirement by selling books, mostly through the mail. His home had been a farm. There was what might have once been a garage out front. This was his money-maker: books about Lincoln and related subjects. Out back there was the barn--another, much larger, book storage area which filled the soul with awe and admiration. We being poor and his prices being steep, I bought this edition of A Spectre out of politeness and because, lacking its dustjacket, it was unusually cheap.

The book, a political satire, is mildly amusing, though it would probably seem dated now since the references are to the early and mid-sixties, to LBJ and Goldwater. Watergate hearings were going on then. Leiber's satire was too mild.

Our host, the bookseller, however, was a fascinating guy. His personal intellectual interest was in millenarian cults of the Midwest, such as those House of David remnants up in Benton Harbor. My own interest in the history of the American Left was tangent, so we spent delightful afternoons chatting on his front porch, I impressed that a farmer knew so much, he probably impressed to discover that not all city longhairs were ignorant.

The old guy and his paradise of books are gone now.(less)

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Jan 29, 2012 Manny rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts

Fritz Leiber, evidently far from sober, writes a bizarre and ill-conceived satire on George W. Bush's America and then manages to get out of his time machine in the wrong decade.

Well, that's the most plausible explanation I've come up with so far.

2 likes · like · see review

Jun 29, 2009 R. Burns added it · review of another edition

I read this years ago. This is an example of a style/concept that today would probably never be published by a ever-increasingly conservative industry. I plan to re-read it in the coming months and I'll do a proper review when I do.

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Aug 04, 2011 Sara Bean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

This is outrageous, bizarre, hilarious, and extremely entertaining.

1 like · like · see review

May 11, 2012 Peter rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: alternate-history, science-fiction

Interesting ideas - bit dated now

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Jan 20, 2008 Olatundji Akpo-sani rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Olatundji by: Rob Geisen

So far so good. Love to get back to 60's pulp Sci Fi. It has it's own flavor. kind of sweet, alien, and just the other side of the tracks from normal. 30 pages into 217

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May 25, 2012 Rick Claypool rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

A chauvinistic, skeletonish moon man fakes his way through Mexican uprisings against hormone-bloated Texans in this silly and cynical not-too-distant future adventure.

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Jun 15, 2008 Reuben Borman rated it 3 of 5 stars

Witty, intelligent, entertaining post-apocalyptic satire.

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May 22, 2013 Warren Landon rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 12, 2013 Bill Ellsworth added it

May 11, 2013 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 05, 2013 Amadeus marked it as to-read

Apr 21, 2013 Gregory rated it 3 of 5 stars

Apr 16, 2013 Dave marked it as undecided · review of another edition

Apr 16, 2013 Joshua Rowland marked it as to-read

Apr 02, 2013 Glenn Nevill rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mar 29, 2013 Fpassow marked it as to-read

Mar 27, 2013 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Mar 13, 2013 Marcos marked it as to-read

Shelves: to-buy

Mar 11, 2013 Mike Heyd added it

Mar 06, 2013 Stephanie added it

Shelves: fant-scifi, pb

Feb 27, 2013 Thomas Cardin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Feb 23, 2013 David Payne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Feb 23, 2013 Jose rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biblioteca, ciencia-ficcion

Jan 29, 2013 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Jan 29, 2013 Dave rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jan 21, 2013 Chris Ogle added it · review of another edition

Jan 17, 2013 Jon added it

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About Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in...more

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Books by Fritz Leiber

Swords and Deviltry (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #1)

Swords Against Death (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #2)

Swords in the Mist (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #3)

Swords Against Wizardry (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #4)

Ill Met in Lankhmar (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #1-2)

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