E-Bomb in P-Back

Douglas Beason’s The E-Bomb: How America’s New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Future Wars Will Be Fought is out in paperback. For the modest outlay of $16, you can read all about the U.S. military’s ongoing campaign to develop real-life phasers, disruptors, and blasters. These directed energy (DE) weapons constitute a rebuttal of pop-cult sci-fi’s recent preoccupation with good old-fashioned projectile-based armaments (so much more gritty and metaphorically connected to what civilians think combat is actually like). Our personal favorite DE weap—let’s just go ahead and call it our “mascot”—is the “pain ray,” a nasty microwave device that can heat up advancing enemy soldiers’ skin, forcing them to flee screaming to their field rations of aloe vera gel. Think of it as a vicious tanning bed.