A Specter Is Haunting Texas

Born and raised in the gravity-free circumlunar satellite known as the Sack, Christopher Crockett La Cruz is an attenuated, essentially muscle-free "Thin." Like his father, he is an actor of some distinction, or at least of much ego. The La Cruzes are heirs to a fortune: a lost mining claim in Canada's Northwest Territory. Earth is in recovery from a devastating nuclear war, and it has gravity--two splendid reasons for a Thin to stay away. But funds are tight. So Christopher's skeletal form is fitted with a titanium exoskeleton and he is dispatched to Earth to claim his heritage.

Things go wrong from the start. Instead of his destination port of Yellow Knife, Canada, the spaceship Tsiolkovsky deposits Christopher in Dallas, Texas, Texas, where everyone is either a pale, 8-foot giant (like a short, burly Thin) or else a dark, bent dwarf. A Texan named Elmo Oil-field Earp ("lineal descendant of the noted gunslinger") nicknames the befuddled visitor "Scully" for his skeletal appearance, then informs him that Texans are treated with growth hormone and Mexicans are stunted because "a man can't feel really free unless he's got a lot of underfolk to boss around." Elmo also informs Scully that Canada and the United States no longer exist: Since World War III, the oil-rich nation of "Texas has extended from the Nicaraguan Canal to the North Pole." It seems Scully must trek some 2,000 gravity-crushed miles through a country he's never heard of before he can even try to claim his heritage.

Elmo generously offers to assist Scully in making his claim, noting that the powerful men of Texas will be eager to meet and assist a man from the half-fabled Sack. And Elmo's sexy secretary--a 4-foot brunette bombshell known as La Cucaracha, or Kookie for short--whispers a time and place to Scully, suggesting an assignation he has no intention of missing.

Among the gigantic leaders of Texas, Scully meets the governor's daughter, a beautiful, 8-foot actress named Rachel Vachel Lamar. She takes as great a shine to the offworlder as Kookie had, and, while not forgetting Kookie, Scully returns Rachel's sentiments. However, he discovers that things are not as they appear. Rachel proves treacherous, and the powerful men use Scully in an assassination attempt (assassination being the time-honored method by which Texans change presidents).

Escaping his new nonfriends, Scully joins Rosa Morales, the fiery Cucaracha. Her interest in him is not only personal. Like Rachel Vachel Lamar, she serves the revolution, seeking to overthrow the new world order of Texas, Texas and liberate the Mexicans. Eight-foot-eight Scully, in his black clothing and shining exoskeleton, resembles La Muerte Alta, El Espectro, El Esqueleto--the one fated to lead the Mexicans to freedom. He assumes the part eagerly. For what greater role can an actor play than Death?

Everything's bigger in Texas

A multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner for his SF and fantasy, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) is best remembered nowadays as a fantasist. He is credited with coining the term "sword and sorcery," and his most famous series, the Lankhmar sequence, stars Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the subgenre's two most influential characters after Conan the Barbarian. In novels of modern magic like Conjure Wife (1953) and Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Leiber invented the subgenre known variously as "contemporary fantasy" and "urban fantasy."

While it's no longer as well known, Leiber's SF is as strong as his fantasy; he was with good reason named an SFWA Grand Master. His first important SF work was the novel Gather, Darkness (1950), in which scientists opposed an oppressive religious dictatorship. His "Change War" series, begun with Hugo Award winner The Big Time (1961), has exerted no little influence on time-paradox SF. Another Hugo Award winner, The Wanderer (1964), chronicles the inadvertent alien devastation of Earth through a multiple-viewpoint approach that would become commonplace in subsequent SF by other hands. The son of Shakespearean actors and a sometime actor himself, Leiber drew on this background extensively in his post-apocalyptic SF novel A Specter Is Haunting Texas (1969).

The phrase "post-apocalyptic SF" evokes grim images of radioactive ruins and ravaged survivors, but A Specter Is Haunting Texas is a comic novel, one operating on a grandly theatrical scale. Many of the novel's characters literalize the phrase "larger than life," topping 8 feet; most of the rest are as exaggerated in their shortness. And nearly everyone, however gigantic or dwarfed, has a larger-than-life personality, from the hot-blooded Latin spitfire La Cucaracha/Rosa Morales to the ultra-tall Texans, and from the self-immolation-mad black Zen Buddhist Guchu to the hypermacho dwarf/revolutionary El Toro. Even Texas itself has grown to enormous size (Leiber is very deliberately playing with "stock types," be they geographical, sexual or racial).

The largest larger-than-life personality belongs, suitably, to the egotistical, sharp-witted star of this production, the circumlunan actor Christopher "Scully" Crockett La Cruz. He'd be unbearable in life, with his arrogance, flamboyance and suicidally immoderate self-confidence, but as a protagonist he's great fun. And his grandiose demeanor does not continue unchanged. Portraying Death the Liberator in an ecstasy of inspiration and self-admiration, Scully sparks an uprising of the oppressed Mexicans. And witnesses their massacre.

No matter how amusing, a book set after an atomic apocalypse and featuring a living skeleton has a dark side. And, after Scully gets his bloody reality check, A Specter Is Haunting Texas becomes dark indeed, complete with Earth's return to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The tonal shift will be too jarringly extreme for some readers; others will be jolted by the sunny switch in the hundred-years-after concluding chapter. But the darkness rises from the very bones of the novel, as visible from the first chapter as Scully's titanium exoskeleton.