Among Tom Ligon's many short and medium-sized works (and one award-winning science fact article published in relation to Fusion rocket technology and advocate of Inertial Electrodynamic Fusion), two published in 1986 and 1993, "The Devil and the Deep Black Void", and "The Gardener" in Analog Magazine, are science fiction stories which are about a Shiʻa Muslim terrorist organization in a largely Muslim space-faring civilization where Baháʼís are space colonists who undertake terraforming on a planet they named "Mazra'ih" (though there is a brief mention of a United States National Spiritual Assembly back on Earth.) The prequel, "For a Little Price" about how terrorists are prevented from crashing a spaceship into the Earth (long predating the events of the 11 September 2001 attacks) was anthologized in 2008 though work began on it in 1986. In the succeeding stories, some of the terrorists are instead driven to an unusual world orbiting a neutron star where Baháʼís live which eventually reveals that civilizations have reached great levels of technology and then mysteriously disappeared. The initial thought is that the civilizations are eradicated by periodic sterilization the planet undergoes but there is also evidence the civilizations vanished peacefully before the sterilization speculating that civilizations shortly after achieving deep space exploration reach some new level of civilization that doesn't require or sustain material civilization in deep space. The ethical conflict of pacifism, a debatable stance associated with the Baháʼí Faith, in the face of terrorists is worked out. One character, who takes on the name of the historical Bábí who performed an assassination attempt on the life of the Shah of Iran, chooses the path of violence in defense of the population by way (as portrayed) of matching a strength of the Baháʼí Faith in acceptance of science compared to a weakness of Shia Islam of superstition.