[Scala SF 39] • Een spook waart rond in Texas

A Spectre is Haunting Texas is a Fritz Leiber novel, 1st appearing as a book in '69, originally published as a 3-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction in '68.

Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz is an actor, fortune seeker adventurer from the isolated orbital technocratic democracies of Circumluna the Bubbles Congeries. He lands in what he believes to be Canada to reclaim family mining interests. He discovers Canada is now N. Texas what remains of civilization in N. 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 giant hormone-boosted Anglo-Saxon inhabitants who rule a diminutive Mexican underclass, the original Texas had secretly ruled the pre-nuclear war USA since 1845: "Of it was never given out to the general public in the states, who never had no brains or guts nohow flustered easy, that this assumption of leadership was annexation--but it was always known to the Speaker of the House the senators who counted in Washington that secretest treaty Texas was boss...With the coming of the 3rd World War the atomization of Washington, New York, San Francisco so forth, secrecy became unnecessary."

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