Description

SPECTER IS HAUNTING TEXAS, A - HARD COVER. New York: Walker, 1968. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). 6 X 8. Hard Cover. Good / Good. Meet Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz. Scully is an actor, an extrovert, and a lady's man. He is also and opportunist and a liberal on the side. Most conspicuously he is a Thin, a muscleless free-fall phenomenon whose home is the Sack circling the Moon, and who can only support life in Earth-gravity conditions by encasing himself in a titanium exo-skeleton. To the inhabitants of the ravaged post World War III Earth, he looks outlandish, even sinister. To their women he looks attractive. Earth looks equally odd to Scully. The uneasy truce brought about by the exhaustion of radioactive material has left the United States only partly inhabitable and wholly dominated by Texas. In fact there is no U.S.A., only Greater Texas. And a Greater Texas demands greater Texans. Horomone treatment has turned Texans into giants and their Mex slaves into unhappy dwarves resentful of their fate and ripe for revolution. To the Mexes, Scully is a Sign, a talisman, a leader. To Scully, the Mexes are a Cause, their superstitious awe of him bringing his actor's vanity to the aid of his humanitarian impulses and forcing him to take the role they thrust upon him. Besides, there are women in the case. This is a remarkable novel of satiric imagination. Fritz Leiber, one of America's top writers of imaginative fiction, has produced a caricature of the future as lively, chilling and ultimately serious of purpose as a Feiffer cartoon.