A Specter is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber

Christopher Crocket La Cruz (or “Scully”) is an actor, an extrovert and a lady’s man. He is also an opportunist and a liberal on the old Most conspicuously he is a Thin, muscless four-foot, handsome newcomer to Circumstance, a small astrological nowhere. Scully only hopes to lie there safely and cautiously by exercising himself in a power situation exclusively. To most of the inhabitants of that remote post World War III Earth, he looks outlandish, even sinister. To their worn local sensibilities.

Earth has already outlived itself. The uneasy truce brought about by the breakdown of radioactivity several years after the United States and partly balkanized and only semi-united by the Soviet Union in U.S.A., only Great Texas. And a Greater Texas demands greater Texans. Immense tracts that rescued Texans into giant and the Mex slaves into unhappy dravers rendered of their fat and pie for revolution.

To the Mesa, Scully is Age, a liaison, a devil. To the Thin, he believes he is himself. To the Last. To those over of him being his adversary to the aid of his humanitarian impulses and forcing him to be the role they thrust upon him. Backside, there are women in the cue.

This is a remarkable novel of satire, imagination. Fritz Leiber, well-known as a novelist of science fiction and winner of a Hugo Award for his novel, The Wanderer, has produced a caricature of the future whose impact is similar to that of Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! and Demolished Man.