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A Spectre Is Haunting Texas
Christopher Crockett La Cruz (or 'Scully') is an actor, an extrovert and a ladies' man. To most of the inhabitants of post-World War III he looks outlandish, even sinister, To their women, he looks very comely. Earth looks equally odd to Scully. Hormone treatment has turned Texans into giants and their Mex slaves into unhappy dwarfs.
To the Mexes, Scully is a Sign, a Talisman, a Leader. To Scully the Mexes are a Cause, The time is ripe for revolution...
To the Mexes, Scully is a Sign, a Talisman, a Leader. To Scully the Mexes are a Cause, The time is ripe for revolution...
222 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1968
14 people are currently reading
410 people want to read
About the author
Fritz Leiber
1,338 books1,053 followersFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. 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 his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation.
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
January 30, 2012
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.
Well, that's the most plausible explanation I've come up with so far.
July 28, 2011
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.
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.
April 14, 2022
3.0 ⭐
An odd little satire about imperialism, acting and freedom, among other things. It's post WWIII and things are pretty messed up. There are surviving societies on the 🌙 moon and in orbital habitats but the state of things on 🌎 Earth is uncertain. An actor from one of the habitats, Christopher Crockett La Cruz -or "Scully", returns to 🌎 Earth to reclaim 👪 family interests. Have lived all his life in zero/low gravity, Scully is very tall and requires a mechanical exoskeleton to function. He arrives to find much of the 🌎 world ruled by Texas, which got through the war largely unscathed. Texans are now bio- engineered giants, who have subjugated the rest of North America 🇺🇸. Various adventures ensue.
As usual, Leiber's 🙂 fine descriptive powers, characters and world 🌎 building carry the story. The 📖 book has a distinct 🥶 cold war vibe, with the JFK assassination featured in the back-story ( it was originally published in 1968, in Galaxy magazine). I remember 😀 much of the story decades later, especially the description of Scully's orbital society, which I found 😄 imaginative. I also remember the 😔 sad fate of 🇨🇦 Canada, including places I'd lived in like Yellowknife 🥰 and Win🏆 nipeg.
It was a decent 👌 post 📫 apocalyptic tale, but I'm won🏆dering if it will not seem seriously dated on a re-read. I certainly liked it, at the ⏳ time.
An odd little satire about imperialism, acting and freedom, among other things. It's post WWIII and things are pretty messed up. There are surviving societies on the 🌙 moon and in orbital habitats but the state of things on 🌎 Earth is uncertain. An actor from one of the habitats, Christopher Crockett La Cruz -or "Scully", returns to 🌎 Earth to reclaim 👪 family interests. Have lived all his life in zero/low gravity, Scully is very tall and requires a mechanical exoskeleton to function. He arrives to find much of the 🌎 world ruled by Texas, which got through the war largely unscathed. Texans are now bio- engineered giants, who have subjugated the rest of North America 🇺🇸. Various adventures ensue.
As usual, Leiber's 🙂 fine descriptive powers, characters and world 🌎 building carry the story. The 📖 book has a distinct 🥶 cold war vibe, with the JFK assassination featured in the back-story ( it was originally published in 1968, in Galaxy magazine). I remember 😀 much of the story decades later, especially the description of Scully's orbital society, which I found 😄 imaginative. I also remember the 😔 sad fate of 🇨🇦 Canada, including places I'd lived in like Yellowknife 🥰 and Win🏆 nipeg.
It was a decent 👌 post 📫 apocalyptic tale, but I'm won🏆dering if it will not seem seriously dated on a re-read. I certainly liked it, at the ⏳ time.
December 30, 2024
A Specter Is Haunting Texas is a satiric novel by Leiber that was serialized in Galaxy magazine from July - September in 1968 and was released in hardback the following year by Walker & Company. Galaxy was edited by Frederik Pohl, arguably the best satirist the field ever knew, who apparently gave Leiber free reign to satirize whatever came to mind. It's a post-apocalyptic novel about a country run by anti-intellectual good old boys but proceeds to satirize everything and everybody and as a result has some misogynistic and racist overtones along with everything else. Too, the cultural and political references are all from so long ago that they're more of historical curiosity than biting commentary. (1968 was busy, and then things got weirder... look it up if you don't believe me.) There's an amusing Shakespearian element, and some nicely written passages, but the ending collapses into an angry-sounding mess that makes it difficult to empathize with any of the viewpoints or characters.
February 21, 2018
Since I'm writing a semi-satirical subversive attack novel I've been reading like-minded novels out of the past to feel some community and perhaps steal a few good ideas. Somehow this little title stirred in my memory. I feel like I must have read it as a preteen sci fi fan some 45+ years ago although almost nothing in it seemed all that familiar--how fleeting is life, human memory...
Anywho, The future as seen from a now somewhat distant past ('68, a rather key year!) looks both interestingly prophetic and totally bogus, as I guess it must. Some of the satirical prophesies made me laugh, some was overdone, some unnerved me as it skirted dangerously close to racist and were certainly sexist.
A friend of mine tells me that satire and humor only work if you punch upward--at those stronger than you. Punching downward--at the immigrant, the weak, the minority, those considered and/or treated as inferiors, women for instance, is only cruel and very quickly not funny. As I'm old enough to remember a time when Polish and Irish jokes were a gas, I question the maxim, but I must say, for today's world I also agree. There's too much suffering in the world that's too real to me now to laugh at the expense of those I wish had the advantages that I, by birth, have always enjoyed. Which leads me to the philosophical problem I have with A Specter is Haunting Texas: its satire, although pretty right on and often chuckle-worthy, is omnidirectional. it takes nothing really very seriously. Therefore, when it's lambasting the blow-hard uber-Americaness of Texans, I'm rather amused but when it jokes about the Mexican slave revolutionaries we're a little too close to the truth of a conflict that the Trump propaganda machine has created this last year and a half. I can actually envision a world of hormone-giant Texans reducing Mexicans to cyborg slaves forced to crouch through doors only 4.5 feet high--but to joke, then, on a horrifically racist term for Mexican workers with the pun "bent-back" (regarding how the Texans keep their slaves' height down) is just not funny anymore.
Granted, Leiber is pretty great stylist. The alliterations, the diction, the voice of our narrator are well penned. Sadly, the vane, self-obsessed, polygamist, a-political actor is not very likable--especially when he really doesn't take sides during the revolution. Then again, revolutions tend to be bloody and two-sided, even when one side is definitely in the wrong before they begin--otherwise there'd be no need for them. Perhaps that's the point. However, an unlikable a-political narrator also means that the novel, to today's reader, sensitive to racial issues, can't even hide behind "its heart's in the right place." Its heart isn't in the right place--the narrator's full of flaws and his pov, therefore, is not at all PC. (At least there's a certain integrity to the narrator not having much of a political opinion on the things he sees--that leaves the politics up to the reader. But I also thought of Leiber flying along behind the white flag of the neutral angels in Dante's Inferno.)
Still, three stars for the jollity, the alliterations, the exuberant writing style, and some of the satire--which works in a surreal sci fi way much of the time. But boo-hiss on the pot shots at lesser targets, the neutrality, racism and sexism that came from satirizing everything shown: irony is all-corrosive and therefore a political dead end. Irony is where ideologies lose their foothold and fall into an abyss of inconsequentiality.
Anywho, The future as seen from a now somewhat distant past ('68, a rather key year!) looks both interestingly prophetic and totally bogus, as I guess it must. Some of the satirical prophesies made me laugh, some was overdone, some unnerved me as it skirted dangerously close to racist and were certainly sexist.
A friend of mine tells me that satire and humor only work if you punch upward--at those stronger than you. Punching downward--at the immigrant, the weak, the minority, those considered and/or treated as inferiors, women for instance, is only cruel and very quickly not funny. As I'm old enough to remember a time when Polish and Irish jokes were a gas, I question the maxim, but I must say, for today's world I also agree. There's too much suffering in the world that's too real to me now to laugh at the expense of those I wish had the advantages that I, by birth, have always enjoyed. Which leads me to the philosophical problem I have with A Specter is Haunting Texas: its satire, although pretty right on and often chuckle-worthy, is omnidirectional. it takes nothing really very seriously. Therefore, when it's lambasting the blow-hard uber-Americaness of Texans, I'm rather amused but when it jokes about the Mexican slave revolutionaries we're a little too close to the truth of a conflict that the Trump propaganda machine has created this last year and a half. I can actually envision a world of hormone-giant Texans reducing Mexicans to cyborg slaves forced to crouch through doors only 4.5 feet high--but to joke, then, on a horrifically racist term for Mexican workers with the pun "bent-back" (regarding how the Texans keep their slaves' height down) is just not funny anymore.
Granted, Leiber is pretty great stylist. The alliterations, the diction, the voice of our narrator are well penned. Sadly, the vane, self-obsessed, polygamist, a-political actor is not very likable--especially when he really doesn't take sides during the revolution. Then again, revolutions tend to be bloody and two-sided, even when one side is definitely in the wrong before they begin--otherwise there'd be no need for them. Perhaps that's the point. However, an unlikable a-political narrator also means that the novel, to today's reader, sensitive to racial issues, can't even hide behind "its heart's in the right place." Its heart isn't in the right place--the narrator's full of flaws and his pov, therefore, is not at all PC. (At least there's a certain integrity to the narrator not having much of a political opinion on the things he sees--that leaves the politics up to the reader. But I also thought of Leiber flying along behind the white flag of the neutral angels in Dante's Inferno.)
Still, three stars for the jollity, the alliterations, the exuberant writing style, and some of the satire--which works in a surreal sci fi way much of the time. But boo-hiss on the pot shots at lesser targets, the neutrality, racism and sexism that came from satirizing everything shown: irony is all-corrosive and therefore a political dead end. Irony is where ideologies lose their foothold and fall into an abyss of inconsequentiality.
November 2, 2023
1975 Grade A
2023 Grade B+
The unique feature that made this book Grade A is the exuberant, flowery, stilted prose. It was so strongly toned that it was almost Shakespearian at times and sometimes took a whole chapter to make one point. It is definitely worth reading once just to experience the prose.
Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing and I started heavy speed reading half way through.
The story is set in the far future where Texas covers/rules almost all of the North American continent and every kind of prejudice and stupidity you can think of has been exaggerated beyond belief. The story is basically a heavy farce/satire of the social/political aspects of life. Everyone uses and cheats everyone else even if it physically hurts them. Into this walks an innocent skinny feeble man raised in zero gravity and wearing an exoskeleton. I had trouble believing he survived the trip at all. But when written, all those problems were much worse than now so it was a real eye opener.
The book is recommended reading once just for its uniqueness.
2023 Grade B+
The unique feature that made this book Grade A is the exuberant, flowery, stilted prose. It was so strongly toned that it was almost Shakespearian at times and sometimes took a whole chapter to make one point. It is definitely worth reading once just to experience the prose.
Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing and I started heavy speed reading half way through.
The story is set in the far future where Texas covers/rules almost all of the North American continent and every kind of prejudice and stupidity you can think of has been exaggerated beyond belief. The story is basically a heavy farce/satire of the social/political aspects of life. Everyone uses and cheats everyone else even if it physically hurts them. Into this walks an innocent skinny feeble man raised in zero gravity and wearing an exoskeleton. I had trouble believing he survived the trip at all. But when written, all those problems were much worse than now so it was a real eye opener.
The book is recommended reading once just for its uniqueness.
September 1, 2009
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.
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.
November 10, 2017
Like the skeletal "spectre" protagonist of this book, the bones are strong. The general concept is funny, and probably culturally relevant and insightful for the time it was written (late 60s), but the story is weak and generally obnoxious. The main character is "comically" misogynistic and detached from the entire plot of the book. Up until the end of the book all he wants to do is pork two women and eventually marry both at the same time. Spoiler: bigamy happens and it's cool, because they're an advanced society living in a space station and social arrangements like tricking two women into being your wives is very progressive, as we all know.
So, aside from "two chicks at the same time," the other major theme is all Texans are oil-blooded fascists, which is really pretty funny at first, but is also just so one-dimensional that it become uninteresting quickly. In fact, all characters are extremely flat. All Texans are bad, dumb, and dim-witted morons trying to control the world. There is only half-hearted attempt to provide nuance to any of the characters, which makes the novel a boring chronicle of meaningless events. All of this is disappointing, because the idea of a future North America run by a Texan state could be incredibly interesting, and would be much funnier if just one dose of subtlety were allowed. Unfortunately, each page turn left me more disappointed, and I was happy to be done with this weird little piece of sci-fi history.
So, aside from "two chicks at the same time," the other major theme is all Texans are oil-blooded fascists, which is really pretty funny at first, but is also just so one-dimensional that it become uninteresting quickly. In fact, all characters are extremely flat. All Texans are bad, dumb, and dim-witted morons trying to control the world. There is only half-hearted attempt to provide nuance to any of the characters, which makes the novel a boring chronicle of meaningless events. All of this is disappointing, because the idea of a future North America run by a Texan state could be incredibly interesting, and would be much funnier if just one dose of subtlety were allowed. Unfortunately, each page turn left me more disappointed, and I was happy to be done with this weird little piece of sci-fi history.
October 26, 2020
Mildly amusing satire about what the USA might be like if racist redneck Republicans were in charge. Imagine that if you can! Our narrator is a cocky character from a lunar colony, who, despite his elongated form and dependence on a metallic frame to keep him upright and moving in Earth's atmosphere, seems to be quite the one with the ladies. He's also an actor and contributes to the revolutionary cause of the truncated Mexican underclass with his stagecraft and general aptitude for showing off. I quite enjoyed it, but the plot seems to fizzle out as the final pages approach.
February 4, 2022
Previously, the only Fritz Lieber I'd read had been sword and sorcery fare. This was far from that...it is more of a post-apocalyptic political satire.
The book seems well written, and has some success with humor, but falls flat quite a bit, as well. I'm glad I've read it, and some scenes and characters are stuck in my mind, but it is unlikely I'll revisit this one. When I want to read more Leiber, I'll head back to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser territory.
The book seems well written, and has some success with humor, but falls flat quite a bit, as well. I'm glad I've read it, and some scenes and characters are stuck in my mind, but it is unlikely I'll revisit this one. When I want to read more Leiber, I'll head back to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser territory.
January 2, 2021
Fritz Leiber is probably best known for his sword-and-sorcery books, which I should read some day. I picked up this scifi volume of his at a library sale, amused by the title. I knew nothing about it going in.
It turns out to be the story of Christopher “Scully” LaCruz, a ham actor from Circumluna, an orbital society of scientists and “longhairs” who escaped from a mid-twentieth century nuclear war, two hundred fifty years before the action of the book. Scully goes down to Earth (wearing a special exoskeleton to cope with the gravity) to lay claim to a mine in Canada that he inherited. He winds up in Dallas, where he finds out that Canada, and much of the rest of North America, got taken over, post-apocalypse, by Texas. Now, Texas was an empire, inhabited by hormone-fed eight-foot-tall (Scully is also tall from having lived in zero G, but skeletally thin where the Texans are beefy) back-slapping, gun-toting yahoos, every Texas stereotype come to massive, cartoonish life. I couldn’t help but picture the first Texan Scully meets, the political fixer Elmo, as a gargantuan Hank Hill. The Texans run a sort of neo-feudal empire, enslaving the Mexicans and making cyborgs out of many of them (and all of them run about four feet tall).
Scully doesn’t really care about this, he just wants his mining claim so he can have enough money to save his theater troupe or something. But he gets sucked into various plots. First, one Texan faction tries to use him against the President (every President of Texas dies by assassination, traditionally). Then ragtag revolutionaries who want to overthrow the Texans and liberate the Mexicans enlist him in their cause. He’s a reluctant revolutionary at best, but as a ham, can’t resist a crowd that sees him as El Esqueleto, the skeletal harbinger of Death- redoing the old trope of Mexicans as greeting white people from abroad as gods. Also, he wants to get laid with two revolutionary women, one a tiny Mexican and another a huge Texan. So he goes on a tour northwards towards his mining claim, inspiring uprisings and learning ghastly truths about what the Texans are doing to the Earth’s mantle.
Leiber was closing in on sixty when he wrote this book and altogether it feels somewhat painfully like a middle-aged man trying to be With It circa 1968. Though, in a way, as both a scifi writer and an actor (he came from a theater family and acted some himself), Leiber could probably claim better hedonism and mind-expansion bona fides than most of the youth at the time. I think his sympathies were probably with “the youth,” both in the novel and in society at large, but from a foggy and at times patronizing distance. Both Scully and, I think, the author, treat revolution as essentially a child’s game, theater.
The whole thing is played as farce — like the sort of comedy Scully might put on with his company, get it?! — and you get the thing you get in a lot of writing by men circa 1960s-2000s where there’s a lot of stereotyping going on and you’re not sure how much of it is “genuine” vs satirical. You’re also not sure how much it matters. The whole premise of the world of the book is reversion to type on a racial scale. The Texans are the whitest white yahoos, having assimilated the rest of the white people of the continent to their empire. Mexicans are spicy, superstitious, physically small, and given to revolutions launched by dramatic gestures. Black people have “hip republics” on the coast, and the one black character is a jive-talking Buddhist monk. Native Americans live in teepees, Russians have genetically engineered themselves into bear-people, there’s a ranting genocidal German-Texan engineer, etc. Luckily for us all the book didn’t have any Jews or Asians. Leiber would presumably point to his farcical white characters as proof he’s an equal opportunity offender. Meditations on gender, or anyway, the
mentality of women, in a similar vein pop up throughout as well.
I’m less interested in offense here than I am in the fact that two hundred odd pages of ethnic farce with a bit of sex farce thrown in for variety gets old. I can almost feel people out in readerland thinking “aha! A writer who cares not for restricting moralism in prose! It must be good!” I, too, find the social moralism in a lot of contemporary criticism constraining but to borrow a contemporary phrase, “this ain’t it, chief.” The book didn’t lack for zip and it was oddly prescient, in some ways, like the prominence of Texan (and other southern) tropes and practices in reactionary white American manhood going forward. But in general, there’s not enough going on, ideas- or action-wise, to really justify the broad farcical elements. ***
It turns out to be the story of Christopher “Scully” LaCruz, a ham actor from Circumluna, an orbital society of scientists and “longhairs” who escaped from a mid-twentieth century nuclear war, two hundred fifty years before the action of the book. Scully goes down to Earth (wearing a special exoskeleton to cope with the gravity) to lay claim to a mine in Canada that he inherited. He winds up in Dallas, where he finds out that Canada, and much of the rest of North America, got taken over, post-apocalypse, by Texas. Now, Texas was an empire, inhabited by hormone-fed eight-foot-tall (Scully is also tall from having lived in zero G, but skeletally thin where the Texans are beefy) back-slapping, gun-toting yahoos, every Texas stereotype come to massive, cartoonish life. I couldn’t help but picture the first Texan Scully meets, the political fixer Elmo, as a gargantuan Hank Hill. The Texans run a sort of neo-feudal empire, enslaving the Mexicans and making cyborgs out of many of them (and all of them run about four feet tall).
Scully doesn’t really care about this, he just wants his mining claim so he can have enough money to save his theater troupe or something. But he gets sucked into various plots. First, one Texan faction tries to use him against the President (every President of Texas dies by assassination, traditionally). Then ragtag revolutionaries who want to overthrow the Texans and liberate the Mexicans enlist him in their cause. He’s a reluctant revolutionary at best, but as a ham, can’t resist a crowd that sees him as El Esqueleto, the skeletal harbinger of Death- redoing the old trope of Mexicans as greeting white people from abroad as gods. Also, he wants to get laid with two revolutionary women, one a tiny Mexican and another a huge Texan. So he goes on a tour northwards towards his mining claim, inspiring uprisings and learning ghastly truths about what the Texans are doing to the Earth’s mantle.
Leiber was closing in on sixty when he wrote this book and altogether it feels somewhat painfully like a middle-aged man trying to be With It circa 1968. Though, in a way, as both a scifi writer and an actor (he came from a theater family and acted some himself), Leiber could probably claim better hedonism and mind-expansion bona fides than most of the youth at the time. I think his sympathies were probably with “the youth,” both in the novel and in society at large, but from a foggy and at times patronizing distance. Both Scully and, I think, the author, treat revolution as essentially a child’s game, theater.
The whole thing is played as farce — like the sort of comedy Scully might put on with his company, get it?! — and you get the thing you get in a lot of writing by men circa 1960s-2000s where there’s a lot of stereotyping going on and you’re not sure how much of it is “genuine” vs satirical. You’re also not sure how much it matters. The whole premise of the world of the book is reversion to type on a racial scale. The Texans are the whitest white yahoos, having assimilated the rest of the white people of the continent to their empire. Mexicans are spicy, superstitious, physically small, and given to revolutions launched by dramatic gestures. Black people have “hip republics” on the coast, and the one black character is a jive-talking Buddhist monk. Native Americans live in teepees, Russians have genetically engineered themselves into bear-people, there’s a ranting genocidal German-Texan engineer, etc. Luckily for us all the book didn’t have any Jews or Asians. Leiber would presumably point to his farcical white characters as proof he’s an equal opportunity offender. Meditations on gender, or anyway, the
mentality of women, in a similar vein pop up throughout as well.
I’m less interested in offense here than I am in the fact that two hundred odd pages of ethnic farce with a bit of sex farce thrown in for variety gets old. I can almost feel people out in readerland thinking “aha! A writer who cares not for restricting moralism in prose! It must be good!” I, too, find the social moralism in a lot of contemporary criticism constraining but to borrow a contemporary phrase, “this ain’t it, chief.” The book didn’t lack for zip and it was oddly prescient, in some ways, like the prominence of Texan (and other southern) tropes and practices in reactionary white American manhood going forward. But in general, there’s not enough going on, ideas- or action-wise, to really justify the broad farcical elements. ***
November 12, 2016
Late 60's post apocalyptic political satire. After WWIII and the atomic fireworks, Texas controls most of the North American continent except for the east coat and the west caost. Texas survived relatively unscathed due a vast network of fallout shelters. Then there's the hormone which the Texans use to grow 8ft tall. Oh yeah, the Texans have turned the Mexicans into midgets and cyborgs, but only during the day to do work. At night, without their cyborg yokes, they can't remember anything that happens during the day. Pot is legal. The main character in the story is Crockette "Scully" La Cruz. An actor. He comes from the Cislunar space colony called the "Sack", because it's a null gee environment. Scully is a "thin", also 8ft tall, with no muscles to speak of, adapted to zero-gee. He arrives on earth, clad in an exoskeleton to allow him to operate on "high" gravity earth. Scully hopes to sell family help mining claims in what was Yellowknife Canada to get funds for his acting troupe back on CisLuna. He gets mixed up in Texas political intrigue, a Mexican insurrection, at least 2 women, mining and Russians; who due to the hormone (remember the hormone?) actually look like bears. Hadn't read Leiber in a long time. Took awhile to get into it, but after a delayed hook the book turned into an entertaining read. A bit short on science fictiony contrivance, but long on observations of the human condition (and the Texas condition) as well as veiled political commentary on late 60's America. At least we didn't start WWIII back then. I hope we don't during the next 4 years.
August 15, 2019
One of those old anti-racist satires that happen to be full of racism, which makes it a bit of an annoying read, especially at the top. The broad comedy often fails, and the big ideas tend to turn out a little neat, which can be for the better or for the worst, depending on how you feel about that.
By the end (I guess this is spoilers in some sense, but only broadly) it turns into a story about the victory of anarchist and socialist societies over capitalism (& explicit Texan fascism) and their need to focus on cleaning up the radiactive wasteland they inhabit, which is pretty chill.
It's maybe just what I have been reading lately, but the total lack of consideration of climate change is pretty strange. It wasn't, obviously, the clear threat then that it is today, but it just feels off to set a story in the future with our contemporary continental geography still explicitly intact. Going back to an imaginary where nuclear weapons made the world a target is a little bizarre. Because you have to aim for and attempt to hit a target. What we know now is that no one has to press the red button, we simply have to organize our global society around the profit motive to turn the world to soup.
My only previous experience with Leiber is the librivox audiobook of The Big Time, which I thought was very good. As annoying as this was to read, it cements him in my mind as a joyful prose stylist who deserves consideration alongside Clifford D. Simak, and I am looking forward to seeing what else he wrote.
By the end (I guess this is spoilers in some sense, but only broadly) it turns into a story about the victory of anarchist and socialist societies over capitalism (& explicit Texan fascism) and their need to focus on cleaning up the radiactive wasteland they inhabit, which is pretty chill.
It's maybe just what I have been reading lately, but the total lack of consideration of climate change is pretty strange. It wasn't, obviously, the clear threat then that it is today, but it just feels off to set a story in the future with our contemporary continental geography still explicitly intact. Going back to an imaginary where nuclear weapons made the world a target is a little bizarre. Because you have to aim for and attempt to hit a target. What we know now is that no one has to press the red button, we simply have to organize our global society around the profit motive to turn the world to soup.
My only previous experience with Leiber is the librivox audiobook of The Big Time, which I thought was very good. As annoying as this was to read, it cements him in my mind as a joyful prose stylist who deserves consideration alongside Clifford D. Simak, and I am looking forward to seeing what else he wrote.
September 29, 2023
Being from Texas, this book carried extra weight. We expect post-apocalypses in the ruins of New York, London or Los Angeles. You know, interesting places.
Granted, a Texas that rules most of North America in a racist but laconic slave state controlled by hyper-stretched Tall Texans... yeah, that's sort of interesting. Like the better nightmares one tries to remember instead of forget.
Scully is an actor from an orbital civilization who comes to Earth with the quest of scrounging funds to finance his lunar acting troop. A charming sort, quick with the ladies, mixing freely with the elongated good ol' boy aristocracy. Ah, but there's revolution brewing. It calls to his romantic persona. Soon he's leading a wandering troop performing rebellion-themed plays... Scully is the specter haunting Texas.
Is this a serious book? Or just a riff from decades past on racism, revolution, and the evolution of human society? I'm going to declare it... serious.
Fritz Leiber was a first-class fantasist giving readers adventure, the taste of magic, the spice of sex and the supernatural. He is seldom thought of as presenting serious themes. Consider his famous creations Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Easy-going, living in the moment. We forget they went mad on the deaths of their first loves; ended their friendship in more than one quarrel. Both spend a cold night on low-pay guard duty discussing the worth of being a hero, as opposed to glorious evil.
Humor often masks a serious story. "Specter" is mostly forgotten; but it offers insight to Leiber's remembered works. Might even give insight into modern Texas.
Granted, a Texas that rules most of North America in a racist but laconic slave state controlled by hyper-stretched Tall Texans... yeah, that's sort of interesting. Like the better nightmares one tries to remember instead of forget.
Scully is an actor from an orbital civilization who comes to Earth with the quest of scrounging funds to finance his lunar acting troop. A charming sort, quick with the ladies, mixing freely with the elongated good ol' boy aristocracy. Ah, but there's revolution brewing. It calls to his romantic persona. Soon he's leading a wandering troop performing rebellion-themed plays... Scully is the specter haunting Texas.
Is this a serious book? Or just a riff from decades past on racism, revolution, and the evolution of human society? I'm going to declare it... serious.
Fritz Leiber was a first-class fantasist giving readers adventure, the taste of magic, the spice of sex and the supernatural. He is seldom thought of as presenting serious themes. Consider his famous creations Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Easy-going, living in the moment. We forget they went mad on the deaths of their first loves; ended their friendship in more than one quarrel. Both spend a cold night on low-pay guard duty discussing the worth of being a hero, as opposed to glorious evil.
Humor often masks a serious story. "Specter" is mostly forgotten; but it offers insight to Leiber's remembered works. Might even give insight into modern Texas.
April 17, 2025
Clearly a satire, possibly a political manifest, too, but written in 1969 about a mostly American context, it left this 2025 Danish reader cold. Not that I'm entirely ignorant of what happened in the USA before I was born, but having more detailed context may have helped. Perhaps. I don't know.
The protagonist arrives to Earth from an orbital colony cut off from Earth for 150 years. Together with him, we discover what has happened on Earth during its isolation. Is the reader really supposed to believe that there's been no radio contact between Earth and orbit during all that time? Both societies, it turns out, are more advanced in technology than when the book was written. I, at least, couldn't really accept that premise, and this makes the protagonist seem incredibly ignorant and unprepared.
There's a couple of other things I'm having trouble accepting. That an 2.5 meter lifetime free-fall dweller with close to zero muscle tissue, walking around on Earth in an exoskeleton, should be attractive to Earth women is beyond belief, but perhaps, again, this is satire.
Also, the story has two or three lengthy waking-up-from-unconsciousness-and-misinterpreting-sensory-input sequences that are just tiresome to get through.
A self-conceited narrator, one too many dei ex machina, and unclear character motivations all detracted from my reading pleasure.
The protagonist arrives to Earth from an orbital colony cut off from Earth for 150 years. Together with him, we discover what has happened on Earth during its isolation. Is the reader really supposed to believe that there's been no radio contact between Earth and orbit during all that time? Both societies, it turns out, are more advanced in technology than when the book was written. I, at least, couldn't really accept that premise, and this makes the protagonist seem incredibly ignorant and unprepared.
There's a couple of other things I'm having trouble accepting. That an 2.5 meter lifetime free-fall dweller with close to zero muscle tissue, walking around on Earth in an exoskeleton, should be attractive to Earth women is beyond belief, but perhaps, again, this is satire.
Also, the story has two or three lengthy waking-up-from-unconsciousness-and-misinterpreting-sensory-input sequences that are just tiresome to get through.
A self-conceited narrator, one too many dei ex machina, and unclear character motivations all detracted from my reading pleasure.
February 21, 2024
This satire would have been a hoot (and controversial) in 1969, but it’s just a bit dated now. After World War 3 Texas extends from Central America to the North Pole. Orbiting circumlunar space stations have been out of contact with Earth for nearly a century, and Thin thespian Christopher Crockett La Cruz, in his exoskeleton, has been delivered to Dallas instead of a now defunct Canada. Racist stereotypes abound (on every possible front) and the deliberately shortened Mexicans are cyborg slaves to the eight-foot tall white Texans. Scully (as the skeletal Christopher is nicknamed) gets enmeshed in a slave revolt led by two women - the white Texan Rachel Vachel and the dark Mexican La Cucaracha, both of whom Scully favours. But Scully’s original mission, to claim a pitchblende mine in Yellowknife, is hampered by Russians drilling a mohole there for radioactive fuel! Fritz Leiber’s black comedy entertains despite its dated references. Some unpleasant racial pejoratives are used but the book does underline the fact that we are ll pretty mad.
December 6, 2018
In Episode 45 - A Specter is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber, we discovered that Fritz Leiber may have coined the term "sword and sorcery" and he may have written some legendary stories, but this book is not to be counted among those same accomplishments.
Line-to-line, the writing is actually pretty good and the dialogue is believable in the world of the book. There's even some great satire in this book (the whole vision of Greater Texas), but it doesn't really end up doing much besides producing a few laughs. Plus,
A Specter is Haunting Texas is far from the worst thing that we've read on TBC, but it does little besides holding up a caricature of America and pointing at it.
Line-to-line, the writing is actually pretty good and the dialogue is believable in the world of the book. There's even some great satire in this book (the whole vision of Greater Texas), but it doesn't really end up doing much besides producing a few laughs. Plus,
A Specter is Haunting Texas is far from the worst thing that we've read on TBC, but it does little besides holding up a caricature of America and pointing at it.
Read
November 22, 2021This 1969 novel completely encapsulates the mythology of America, and was an amazing harbinger of the zeitgeist that emerged in full form half a century after its publication. Leiber, one of the lesser known stars of the New Wave of science fiction probably best represented by Harlan Ellison, arguably more insightful. I read this novel sometime in my teens or early adulthood, so this view is now decades old, but the current cultural presentation of modern-day America brought the book back into my mind. One of the best examples of the sociological examination of "normal" society by a visiting alien tropes ever written, IMO.
April 29, 2023
A short book which I should have devoured over two or three lunchtime reads, but which took me almost a week. Leiber's riotous prose is delightful, but this scattershot and unfocused material, where all the author's satire and thought is lost in an ambling and largely nonsensical story of two plot lines that come together, in however unlikely a fashion, for an anticlimactic end.
December 22, 2018
1/10. Media de los 6 libros leídos del autor : 2/10
La nota y la media lo dice todo, ¿no?. Leiber es otro de mis autores "malditos". Leí cosas suyas solo porque las pillaba de oferta de chaval.
La nota y la media lo dice todo, ¿no?. Leiber es otro de mis autores "malditos". Leí cosas suyas solo porque las pillaba de oferta de chaval.
May 6, 2019
A fun satire with goofy characters and laughable societies in space and on Earth. Light reading and dated but fun.
February 16, 2020
A brilliant blend of science fiction and horror. Fritz Leiber creates a unique world all his own, and effortlessly brings you along.
July 8, 2020
An actor in an exo-skeleton descends from a lunar colony to claim a mining legacy, but must battle the giant hormone-fed Texans who rule North America. A Science Fiction Book Club selection.
August 12, 2022
HMMM!
March 5, 2023
Occasionally humorous, but mostly boring. Very anticlimactic as well. Overall, a disappointing read.
September 8, 2025
One of the most horrifying visions of a post WWIII future, one where Texas rules most of the Americas. Not very PC, but it's funny and has some good satire about right wing ideology.
September 21, 2024
Dull. Not exactly what I expected and boring as all hell. Did not finish.
July 22, 2018
A profoundly weird book. It starts out as broad satire of Texan (and implicitly post-WWII American) chauvinism, racism, greed, etc. Then it shifts gears into being about a revolution against this society by the Mexican underclass. THEN the emphasis on the revolution is kind of jettisoned, and the only Mexican revolutionary who got much character development dies off-screen. At the end of the book, the protagonist (and the day) are saved by a deus ex machina (a minor character who disappeared much earlier reappears and works everything out), and the long-running love triangle between the protagonist and his Mexican and Texan (female) suitors is left basically unresolved. The last chapter is a weird, tacked-on epilogue, in a noticeably terse and "telegraphic" style that jars with the rest of the book, explaining in little detail what happens in the century following the proper ending of the book.
It's very hard to imagine this book getting published at any time other than the late 60s. Leiber, of course, wrote many solid pulp stories in prior decades, but this book has too little action, and too much meandering introspection on the part of the narrator/protagonist, to be a rip-roaring pulp adventure. The satire is broad and sometimes effective, but ultimately kind of shallow, and in any case disappears abruptly a ways into the novel. It's nowhere near as mature or interesting, or as detailedly-imagined, a work as Our Lady of Darkness.
I guess you had to be there at the time.
It's very hard to imagine this book getting published at any time other than the late 60s. Leiber, of course, wrote many solid pulp stories in prior decades, but this book has too little action, and too much meandering introspection on the part of the narrator/protagonist, to be a rip-roaring pulp adventure. The satire is broad and sometimes effective, but ultimately kind of shallow, and in any case disappears abruptly a ways into the novel. It's nowhere near as mature or interesting, or as detailedly-imagined, a work as Our Lady of Darkness.
I guess you had to be there at the time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 8, 2017
A skeleton-like man from the moon arrives at 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.
As that introduction suggests, complete nonsense ensues.
For some reason I entered into this book with the expectation that it was going to be a meditative, literary piece of science fiction. Far from it!
It's a hokey, silly story, with frivolous dialogue from the Heinlein school of science fiction. Occasionally fun for all that, the serious themes of exploitation and revolution are wholly out of place when back-grounded against the picaresque adventures of an hammy alien thespian from outer space.
It's certainly free-wheeling in that recognisably swinging 1960's style, but it would have been more enjoyable if it had simply dropped any semblance of a story and stuck with the theatrics.
As things stood, when the plot begun to resolve itself I lost interest in Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz and his pint-sized revolutionaries.
An ludicrous oddity.
As that introduction suggests, complete nonsense ensues.
For some reason I entered into this book with the expectation that it was going to be a meditative, literary piece of science fiction. Far from it!
It's a hokey, silly story, with frivolous dialogue from the Heinlein school of science fiction. Occasionally fun for all that, the serious themes of exploitation and revolution are wholly out of place when back-grounded against the picaresque adventures of an hammy alien thespian from outer space.
It's certainly free-wheeling in that recognisably swinging 1960's style, but it would have been more enjoyable if it had simply dropped any semblance of a story and stuck with the theatrics.
As things stood, when the plot begun to resolve itself I lost interest in Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz and his pint-sized revolutionaries.
An ludicrous oddity.
September 11, 2016
Forse dopo aver letto "Il grande tempo" avevo attese eccessive, forse le mie capacità di apprezzare un certo umorismo sono limitate, o forse questo testo, messo in scena da attori bravi (ma davvero bravi) potrebbe strappare qualche risata ogni dieci o venti pagine. Per il resto, volendo forse schernire un certo tipo di narrazione e ambientazione tipicamente statunitensi ne resta in realtà poco comicamente prigioniero. Noia mortale.
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