Book Review: A Spectre is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber

 

A Spectre is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber

 197 pages, Ace Books Mass Market Paperback

First published, 1968

This book is an insane thing that should not exist on multiple levels. A political satire that no publisher should have greenlit ever, with icky characters and ideas abound. How this was conceived of is just the first mystery, but we can solve how it got published. It was serialized over three issues of Galaxy magazine by editor Fredrik Pohl, who was one of the best tongue-in-cheek writers the genre had (see his novel The Space Merchants, co-written with CM Kornbluth), and that solves that. Pohl has the kind of sense of humor that, despite being a great SF mind, also enjoys the completely bonkers concept.

Fritz Leiber, the author, is a very interesting figure in Science Fiction. A very respected author who has written classics like The Conjuring Wife, Gather, Darkness, and a personal favorite of a young PKD, Destiny Draws Three. But as respected as he was, he also had the reputation for writing The Wanderer, which is universally agreed upon as the worst novel to win the Hugo Award. 

The Wanderer is also a batshit crazy bizarro SF novel, that is about feline Anarchist nympho aliens who destroy the moon by bringing their planet into orbit with the earth. It had to be a lifetime achievement award because it was nominated against The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith and Whole Man by John Brunner, while not perfect, those books are actually, you know, good. Not like hilarious, The Wanderer is only good in the way Megaforce or an 80s Chuck Norris movie are ironically good.

This novel is even weirder, bonkers on a level that is hard to explain, but it at least it seems to be some intelligent satire. Of course, there are plenty of politics of the era I didn’t get, and I suspect most will not catch on that the title is a play on the opening line of the communist manifesto. 

The plot is described on the back cover…

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...¨

So Scully is an actor who grew up in Zero-G in orbit, so when he comes to what he thinks will be Canada in an exo-skeleton suit, he discovers that Greater Texas has taken over most of North America. The good ol’boys in Texas take growth hormones so they can be eight feet tall and enslave those tiny Mexes. Yeah, that setup is just the beginning of the madness.

“Scully, son, ever since the great Texas ward industrial migration and World War three, Texas has extended from the Nicaraguan canal to the North Pole, including most of Central America, all of Mexico, nearly all of Canada, and all that matters in the flibberty gibbet 47 I mean former United States of America.¨

Everything is bigger in Texas, and I feel like this 50-year-old novel would have hit hardest in the GW Bush years, when it seemed we were getting the violent neocon fantasies of a YALE grad trying to be super Texan.  

“That is, at present. We Texans might take a fancy to extend our boundaries any day. There's Cuba to be reconquered, and Indochina and Ireland, and Hawaii and hither Siberia. But on the whole, we Texans are peaceable, tolerant shoot-and-let-shoot people. We whipped the Cherokees and the Mexicans and tied the Russians and Chinese, we're inclined to rest on our laurels and less, of course, roused when we get dynamic as an automated cotton picking rig goosed by the program for the Irish jig.

But as for being independent, let me tell you, Scully my boy, Texas is the golddurnest independent nation in the entire annals of political science.”

You see what I mean. I think Lieber lived in Chicago, and I am not sure this wouldn’t have been a more effective satire written by a Texan, but this novel, as weird as it is, made me laugh with parts like that. There are plenty of icky political and social notions, but the setup and world-building are just so Bizarro.

There is a fake historical quote at the opening of chapter 3 governors ranch that really he explains the insane world building of this novel “Texas is a wandering and tattered ribbon of white fascism, ineffectually separating the non directive black democracies and hip republics of Florida and California, now occupying at most two percent of North America, two cents worth of bloated mentally bombed out squaredom! -Africa America, by Booker T. Nkrumah

Can you say this novel works or is good? Not really, I can’t tell this is a genius work of SF satire but I can say it is a weird as hell artifact that seems impossible. 

Elmo shook his head and sucked his lips with a plop. “Nope, Scully, and achieving real freedom we've long ago discarded the phantasms of democracy. For the immaterial, ignoble ballot we've received, it substantiates the material, brutally preferable, noble bullet, which is the item Longhorn E. A the. most contumeliously refuses to face. Adverse ballots he'd like to cascade off him like Cottonwood balls.”

OK, that sounds like today. I am glad I checked it out. In fairness, I can only give this book three out of five stars, because it is deeply flawed. I personally had a five-star experience because I just couldn’t believe what I was reading, or understand how this got published.