A Specter is Haunting Texas

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A Specter is Haunting Texas (1968) is a science fiction novel by Fritz Leiber's The novel anticipates both the "Texasassination" of culture and politics in the United States (then and now) and the construction of low gravity orbital communities, presenting a dystopia both alien and terrifyingly familiar.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Actor, fortune seeking and adventurer Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz from the long isolated orbital technocratic democracies of Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries, lands in what he believes to be Canada to reclaim family mining interests only to discover that Canada is now North Texas and what is left of civilization in North America is ruled by primitive, backslapping, bigger than life anti-intellectual "good ole boys" convinced of their own moral superiority.

In the tortured version of history known to the hormone boosted giant, Anglo-Saxon inhabitants who rule a diminutive Mexican underclass, the original Texas, or Texas, had actually secretly ruled the pre-nuclear war United States since 1845.

"Of it was never given out to the general public in the states, who never had no brains or guts nohow and flustered easy, that this assumption of leadership was annexation--but it was always known to the speaker of the House and the senators who counted in Washington that secretest treaty Texas was boss...With the coming of the Third World War and the atomization of Washington, New York, San Francisco, and so forth, secrecy became unnecessary..." (p. 22)

Texas escaped the nuclear destruction of the rest of the United States because of the foresight of Lyndon the First. An emormous bunker then known as the Houston Carlsbad Caverns-Denver-Kansas City-Little Rock Pentagram and now referred to simply as the Texas Bunker had saved the heartland during a war that destroyed both American coasts, Europe, Russia, China, and Africa. Texas then conquered the rest of the continent, although Hawaii and Cuba remain stubbornly "unconquered."