Published by Subterranean Press on July 22, 2025
Alastair Reynolds writes some of science fiction’s most entertaining space operas. The Dagger in Vichy is not that. Promotional materials market the novella as a blend of fantasy and science fiction, but I don’t think it’s that either. Arthur C. Clarke’s familiar observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is at work here. The novella is grounded in credible science, but much of the science has been lost as society has regressed to a state that approximates medieval times. I view The Dagger in Vichy as a blend of Arthurian fiction and science fiction, with lost science taking on the role of magic.
The story takes place in a future France. It is the thirty-second year in the reign of the nineteenth Imperator. The characters live in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event, but one that occurred hundreds of years earlier, so distant from the present that it no longer merits discussion.
A playwright and a group of actors are traveling in a horse-drawn wagon, performing at small venues, on guard against an ambush by plundering thieves. They have a particle-pistol and Bernard, an ex-soldier, carries a carbon-bladed dagger “with a nugget of depleted uranium lodged in the hilt.” Although some advanced technology has survived, most has been lost or exists as relics from the Twilight Centuries. Fortunately for humans in need of transportation, horses endure.
The playwright is Guillaume of Ghent. His best writing years are behind him and he knows it. He no longer has a cheery disposition. “The good humour and charity that once flowed out of him without ease had reduced, like his pissing, to a miserly trickle.”
The narrator is Rufus, a boy who is in service to Guillaume after being rescued from the gallows for stealing food. A few other players make up the troupe.
The traveling actors happen upon a dying Knight of the Imperial Guard who implores them to take a wooden box to the Imperator in Avignon. Bernard, ever loyal to the Imperator’s troops, swears he will make the delivery.
Of course, the knight warns them not to open the box. Of course, they do. The object in the box, at first seen only by Guillaume but heard by an eavesdropping Rufus, seems to have supernatural powers.
For reasons best discovered by the reader, Bernard and Guillaume become divided about the wisdom of taking the box to Avignon. The dissolving bond of two old friends and the desperate action one of them takes against the other gives the story its drama.
The true nature of the object in the box will slowly dawn upon most readers, perhaps more quickly than it dawned on me. I admire the craftsmanship with which Reynolds sets up the reveal. His vision of a future France is easily captured without excessive description, as he draws upon familiar images of traveling shows and mounted knights (albeit knights armed with particle weapons). The plot is clever and the resolution is satisfying.
Subterranean is marketing The Dagger in Vichy in a signed limited edition. If you’re not a collector, it’s also available as an ebook.
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