A Spectre Is Haunting Texas

I listened to the LibriVox.Org audio book of "The Big Time" by Fritz Leiber. I had been searching for "A Spectre Is Haunting Texas" by the same bloke, but found "The Big Time". I was amazed at how well it has stood the test of time (published in 1958), and how well it was read by Karen Savage.


LibriVox is "the acoustical liberation of books in the public domain", and has tons of good stuff to listen to.

"The Big Time" is really a strange and gripping story.

I'd been looking for "A Spectre Is Haunting Texas" by Fritz Leiber as a nostalgia trip. In my early teens I read a lot of Science Fiction, and the title of this book has stuck in my mind.

I didn't remember much about the novel, except that I'd enjoyed it and that it featured a human used to living in space and so in need of an artificial motorized exoskeleton for his trip to Earth.

That cover, is it tacky or good artwork? In the book the "spectre" is actually an actor, so his dramatic pose fits well. If fact he knows how to sword fight, but only as an actor and keeps on missing his (real) opponent because he falls back onto fake fighting taught to him in (space) acting school. Fritz Leiber was one of the greats.

Then I wondered who had painted the cover. I'd wanted to be a painter of SF film posters and SF book covers till I was about 18, and that makes me interested in those that actually managed it.


The artist is a bloke called Richard Clifton-Dey, born in Yorkshire, UK. If  you search for the name (in DuckDuckGo for example) you'll see more examples of his work.


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