Fiat Lux

I've pondered what a single civilization that in the vein of China holds to an idea of its continuous existence for 40,000+ years would be like. And in the process of it, I've given it a period when laser swords (as in lightsabers) were predominant. Said civilization used them about 20,000 years ago, and military power marches on in that case. Suppose such a civilization were to re-discover the old laser swords, an entire trove of them in fact....and some dumb fucks decide the best response to modern weaponry is to revert to archaic weapons as a use for terrorism? I could see some extremists using the laser swords again for intimidation purpose (i.e. he/she's badass enough to kill with that old piece of shit? O.o. Run away, run away!), but any large-scale use of them in combat would be the equivalent of the US Army against the Assyrian Army: Curbstomp in favor of plasma rifles and strafing runs that unleash Missile Spam on the laser-sword users.

Though the weapons might be good to intimidate locals who are accustomed to use of Palaeolithic technology and eschew the hypothetical FTL society's regular weapons, and they would also spare expensive assaults with equipment on the equivalent of Aurignacian-era humans. I mean, imagine this:

*Cavemen come running at a laser-sword wielder*

*Laser-sword wielder chops all the cavemen to bits.*

That something is intensely cool to look at would not make it useful. Though dealing with an ancient civilization that discovers weapons like this from its precursors would be interesting as a sci-fi book or summat.

I've been wanting to write a novel about the Eastern Front, and another Nazi-related alternate history novel. The first novel is set about the time of Operation Bagration and concerns the mammoth Soviet offensive of that time and ends with the discovery of the concentration camps. The kicker is that one of the Soviet commissars that discovers it (a fictional commissar) participates in the Katyn massacre in the prologue. That novel is intended as delving into the evil men do and as a comparison of the two most loathsome regimes in European history. It would also cover both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army's participation in WWII atrocities.

The other novel concerns Hitler v. Bin Laden. Yes, you read that right. Islam is by nature an egalitarian religion, while the Fuhrerprinzip of the Nazis is basically a contradiction to that in a pure form that it wasn't to Christianity. While Christianity wouldn't be capable of effective resistance against Nazism, Islam rather lacks the current Christian willingness to take a stand for what's right. The plot concerns the National Socialists against an Islamist terror movement and is both an allegory of the War on Terror and an exploration of what evil is, and how to define darkness and whether or not ideologies can truly be called evil in the end.

Any comments on the potential shitstorms or otherwise that both novels could create?

Vis-a-vis Deborah bat Omri:

Demons, as a rule, are in appearance the spitting image of certain deities worshiped by the pre-Christian population. They derive their appearance from the old god Pan. So, I figured that Deborah's father, the "Demon Asmodel," should not be an actual Judeochrislamic Demon/Jinn so much as the god Pan, still alive and kicking along with most of the old Indo-European deities, and attempting to protect the region of Earth from a rising galactic power, the Bizjarran Empire, which has already conquered a huge chunk of the galaxy and the region around Earth, though presumed barren, is fully encircled by Bizjarran rule.

Asmodel is the god Pan, god of shepherds under the Greco-Roman religion, and is not evil insofar as his very nature, he has just been (pardon the pun) demonized by the Church, due to Pan's very nature being chaos, whereas the Church sides with Order. Pan keeps his own name, but his daughter thinks that he is the Devil himself, which causes a great deal of friction whenever he attempts to speak to Deborah. Deborah is 60% Pan in terms of her genes, but among the 40% human genes she has is the genes coding for her physical form and body shape. Her internal organs and so on are more along the lines of Pan, and enable her to regenerate wounds, even wounds that would be fatal to ordinary humans. She has powers that modern-day people see as derived from either demons or the Hindu gods or something besides what it is, the old Greek gods, who are alive and well and rather amused at human depictions of them.

Zeus, or Thor, as he was known to the Germans, in particular makes an appearance in one of the first appearances of Deborah bat Omri, where she's reading Neil Gaiman's story about Mr. Wednesday, when Zeus himself shows up, on a Wednesday, no less. But regardless, in the Shades of Grey universe, the demons are merely the old gods, given dark names though they themselves are not dark, as such.

Pan, or Asmodel, is attempting to stop the Bizjarrans from noticing Earth, and Deborah later finds out that, and it starts to make her wonder if the 21st Century is really what it's cracked up to be.