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LOL. I'll bet you had an AI write that. :-)

Book one will be pretty much what you read. So I think that will be fine. Book two's first half is mostly about the beginning of Revelation disasters, the Unholy Trinity's ongoing attempts to consolidate religion behind Connor, and Connor's issues, ranging from his anger at his father to his growing mental health issues as Adam grows increasingly awake inside him.

Since the books will almost certainly attract the curiosity of Christians who come across it, there will be a foreword from me that explains that this is not a story that faithfully follows Revelation, but rather a different story loosely based on Revelation.

Regarding God creating homosexuality, it's something I intend to explore through the lens of the Antichrist, who is trying to corrupt his followers. So, he will say all kinds of things that would cause serious Christians' heads to explode, but he's the Antichrist, so you can't expect him to sound like a good Christian in these books.

Although the Bible opposes homosexuality, there are all kinds of ways Connor can spin that. In answer to the question why God would create something he opposes, He opposes much of what humans do to each other and the planet, He knew it would come about, yet he created angels and humans anyway, resulting in beings like Satan and Hitler and staggering suffering for much of humanity.

And religions get a lot of things wrong even when they tell themselves their Bible is inerrant. If the Christian Bible is the inspired Word of God, how come Catholics and Protestants can't agree on what books belong in the Bible? They're only inerrant as long as you discount the "false" beliefs of all the other major denominations you disagree with. Lots of things for Connor to work with, and there won't be anyone in the books to challenge his corrupting rhetoric.

In a similar vein, the Catholic Church says teens will go to Hell if they masturbate. Why would God give teens the ability to masturbate, only to turn around and expect kids not to do so?

There'll be at least one chapter where Connor gives a lot of false views to the teenage boy he seduced, which is easy to do since the kid believes Connor is Christ. If Christ starts telling you things that disagree with your original beliefs, who are you going to believe, Christ or some ancient book written and assembled by fallible human beings? It'll be interesting to write some of that dialogue and put forth his corrupting views. And for what it's worth, they're not Connor's views either. He simply says the things he needs to to corrupt his followers.

As for your expectations of what the Antichrist is like as a human being, what are you basing it on? A few verses in the Bible? Who's to say he doesn't care about his family? Even Hitler had a family. And as I noted above, my story is only loosely based on Revelation, especially as you go from book to book. That's what the foreword is for. If you want to read a Christian-themed story based loosely on Revelation, great. If you want a faithful telling of Revelation, these aren't the books you want to read.

I decided Connor will be bisexual, although it won't come up until book two, where it will make a few eyebrow raising scenes possible. This raises the question of whether it is our soul or our DNA+nurture that determines sexual orientation. Since homosexuality is widespread among animals (who don't have a soul), it has to be the latter. I could extend that to ask whether it is God, our soul, or our DNA that determines our gender.

Remember, George, I'm looking for a very powerful weapon that
- has the ability to create the kind of extreme damage to St. James's destroyers caused by the mattergy guns (e.g., a single shot can plow all the way through a ship, in spite of the target's reinforced shields and hull plating)
- requires the Hercules to expend a huge quantity of energy to charge the superweapon, so much so that after a few shots/reloads, the ship's overloaded neutrino annihilator is damaged sufficiently that the Hercules can no longer fire weapons nor escape using her stardrive (i.e., the superweapon is a failure)
- since that much energy from the fired weapon could easily wipe out the destroyers without breaking a sweat, I need a way for most of that energy to not make it to the targets; ideally 2/3 to 3/4 of the energy expended by the Hercules each time she fires should somehow be lost to space, another dimension, converting the annihilator's EM energy to some hokey form the weapon can fire, etc.
- due to scaling limits on nova technology, it isn't possible to fire that much EM energy through a supernova (that would break other parts of the story), hence the need for a new weapon technology using a different form of energy, which is still roughly as destructive as EM energy (e.g., same order of magnitude)
- the solution cannot simply be a mega version of a supernova with a different name; it has to be a different weapon in certain key ways, which is proven unusable in chapter 1's combat so that it's never deployed by either side; also, it has to be possible for the Colonies to shore up ship defenses (presumably shields and more hull plating) against this weapon in the future, just in case the Imperium tries again
- I've tried all kinds of weird variations, none of which hold up as a workable solution for the battle that satisfies the above requirements and doesn't make me retch with how stupid it is; I even considered though never fully wrote up a variant in which the fired new form of energy loses much of its energy as it travels from the Hercules to the target (this last one is similar to your suggestion to open a rip in spacetime, which could then suck out much of the fired energy into another dimension); it may be time to try writing that one up

I was hoping not to outright contradict too many pesky laws of physics other than the ones that most space operas usually rely on as well. If something clearly violates physics, then I would have preferred to conjure up a bit of technobabble to explain why.

>After all, if you can "see" a laser being fired, it's probably not a laser but rather something much slower.

I've seen lasers with a continuous beam, mostly in lab photos, but also at concerts. So those must be in the visible spectrum, making the light beam itself visible within visible light, or is none of that the actual laser but rather what the beam passes through, as someone on Quora suggests below as well? Obviously, you can fire something that's not visible to humans at all, but I'm assuming they're firing something visible. So, would all those lasers under Google images be invisible in space? If so, that's cool, but annoying for me.

>from Quora:
>If you fire a laser through perfectly clear, clean air, it's invisible. What you're seeing when you see a beam of light (any beam of light, not just a laser) is >the beam illuminating something in its path - it could be dust, smoke, steam

I had no idea.

I might be able to salvage my current write-up by having the "loss" of energy occur when the incoming EM energy from the annihilator is converted to hokey energy, which is what the new weapon fires, rather than after the weapon is fired and somehow diverges faster than EM energy.

Cacas!

I went with imXes for now. Other forms include imXed and imXing. :-)
Thanks for your help.

I need a short name for implode-explode (the official name), which is what my ships do when their annihilators (formerly reactors) are breached, usually by enemy fire. Humans would quickly find something shorter to call it by. I have yet to think of anything cool, although I vaguely recall I may have brought this up long ago. Things I'm considering or have already rejected:

i-explode
imp-explode (or imp/explode) - I think I used this in my last draft
splode - to splode, a verb; it sploded; this is obviously slightly ludicrous, which makes it a candidate; it has an existing definition (explosion), but that's easily modified

implode - everyone knows what that is, and an implosion of a ship caused by a breached annihilator is always followed by an explosion (a little bang)
explode - no good; although the use of this word could generally be understood to mean implode, followed by a little bang, there are other reasons/ways a ship might explode
little bang (or bang) - the ship little-banged; did the ship bang yet? - bang is nice and short, and is a good example of the kind of thing they'd use; it is rather weird though but then so is the story
boom - similar to bang

So far, bang and splode are my favorites. Splode has an existing definition (slang for explode), but that definition is easy to modify. The reason I like those two is because they are both slightly ludicrous and one syllable long.

Any others?

Thanks
Dirk

Colonel Mustard did it to the juicer with a ketchup bottle.

>>"The Spice Must Flow"
The Connor trilogy uses "Great deeds await you." My version of "May the Force be with you."
I'm reasonably sure I have something like it in Archangel Syndrome to.

As of this evening, I'm leaning toward neutrino annihilator to replace reactor, although the name doesn't spell out that the output is energy, though it obviously is if you annihilate matter. I can always mention that it converts neutrinos to energy when I first introduce the term. And annihilator screams, "Danger, Will Robinson," which is even better than reactor, IMO. Sexier too.

Not sure if I still need an informal name for the annihilator (eg juicer, boiler) since I really like the new name as is. If I come up with something cute that suggests total annihilation, I'll consider it.

Following is my last! writeup for a superweapon (needs a little cleanup). It's a bit long (1.5 pages) given that the Hercules is sitting right there charging the superweapon, but I no longer care. It includes a short message by St. James to her taskforce, which I think is worth the space. The unknown form of energy fired by the weapon dissipates much more quickly than EM energy, so only about 1/4 of the initial blast hits the ship.

Nice to hear.

I don't know why it wasn't obvious to me sooner, but a key difference between Adam's soul and a new soul, had one been provided by God, is that Adam's soul is sentient, whereas a new soul is not (initially). I like, though, that they are forced to share Adam's soul. However, Adam doesn't want to share his soul with something (someone) he considers a parasite, which is a reasonable interpretation of what Connor is (yikes!). Adam intends to destroy him once the mission is over.

Better yet, Connor is more like a tumor. He's not a separate organism; he's an outgrowth of the story's unique circumstances. So, one could say that being reborn causes tumors, whose sentience comes from the sentience of the host. So, there will be another battle at the end between Adam and Connor as Adam tries to purge him from his soul. What a great way for Adam to think of Connor. How do you reason with someone who thinks you're nothing but a disease.

So, the hero of this story is a disease. How's that for a twist? I love it. :-)

1. What would Eve become if she left her glorified body? Do I make a special case out of her rather than simply stating she returned to Earth? Is she given a normal body for the duration of her second time on Earth? Where would she get that body? By being reborn? Also, what's the point from a story-telling perspective? It would also raise the question of whether Jesus too will shed his glorified body when he comes back. And let's not forget, Jesus's body was glorified while he was still on Earth. Therefore, glorified bodies can exist here.
2. The story wouldn't work unless I use Adam & Eve. After all, they are responsible for the disaster that befell mankind (naturally, Satan is also to blame).
3. These are totally unique circumstances, so Adam developing a multiple personality-like division within himself doesn't seem New Ageist depending on how I describe it. Since Connor never had a soul of his own, he technically doesn't exist. Or you could think of Connor as merely another of Adam's personas.

Christians believe that what makes us truly human is the soul. So who's to say a person with multiple personalities is an illness of the mind? Why not simply a reflection of multiple personalities in the soul, which arise for reasons we don't know? To me the most interesting cases of multiple personality disorder are the ones where each personality is a unique, fully functioning persona. Which of them is the real person, driven by the soul? And why are they so fully functional if only one of them is driven by the soul? Why is the latter personality sometimes indistinguishable from the others?

Or I can simply state that Connor/Adam are "like" someone with multiple personalities. The explanation for it will probably be the result of however it was that Adam was chosen as the soul of Connor. Perhaps it's the result of Adam asking God to allow him to return to Earth. It's not something that's normally done, so the result of doing so could be the "natural" development of a distinct personality within the soul for each time you are reborn. Who's to say I'm wrong about that? It's not normally done, so I'm free to make cacas up. :-)

Since Adam's soul is wounded, God may decide to allow it, knowing that the mission will heal his soul. But, of course, the price of that healing is the formation of a second persona, without whom the mission would fail. Or, knowing that Adam needed help, God could have been the one to give him the second persona. That would make this the only such event in history.

Technically, Connor is Adam. What's weird is my story planning has led me to the point where Adam is also the Antichrist. I no longer recall if my original idea for the story included Connor having Adam's soul. Probably not since I remember being concerned that I had no good ending for the trilogy. Some will definitely say what I came up with isn't a good ending either. :-)

CORRECTION: Turns out I did always plan for Connor to have Adam's soul. That's why Mother Palermo (the one possessed by legion in chapter 11) told him just before her death, "You are more than you know."