A Spectre Is Haunting 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.