The Dagger in Vichy by Alastair Reynolds: Review by Alexandra Pierce

The Dagger in Vichy, Alastair Reynolds (Subter­ranean 978-1-64524-280-2, $40.00, 120pp, hc) August 2025. Cover by Andrew Davis.

The Dagger in Vichy is very different from Alastair Reynolds’s other recent work. His most recent novel, Machine Vendetta (2024), saw him return to the Revelation Space universe. This novella, on the other hand, is set on Earth – albeit (it becomes clear) many centuries in the future. No space op­era, The Dagger in Vichy follows a small acting troupe as they travel through a much-changed France, charged with bringing a mysterious relic to His Holiness at Avignon. The relic brings wonder, and strife, in its wake.

The narrator is Rufus, a young lad who was jailed for theft, and then saved from the noose through the kindness of the playwright Master Guillaume. Writing the story many years later, he has the benefit of hindsight, but still isn’t entirely sure about some of the events that happened over those weeks. Travelling with eight companions, led by Guillaume and the old soldier Bernard, the company comes upon a dying soldier. As he dies, he makes Guillaume and Bernard pledge to take a precious box to Avignon, to assist in the fighting. They agree – and everything goes south from there.

There is disagreement between the two leaders of the troupe about what route to take, and whether they should meet their acting commitments or if their oath should take precedence. Things take a turn even further for the worse when Guillaume starts talking to the relic, which Rufus hears while feigning sleep. Rufus then gets drawn even further into mystery and trouble when Guillaume convinces him to use his lock-picking skills on the box. Guillaume becomes obsessed with the box’s contents, and disaster slowly ensues.

Reynolds does an excellent job with a story that could almost be set in early modern France, slip­ping in references that upend that view. The troupe travel by horse-drawn wagon; there seems to be no long-range communication; Guillaume writes his plays by hand, on paper. But Bernard’s dagger has a nugget of depleted uranium in the hilt, armies use energy-artillery, and some rich cities have healing coffins for medical emergencies. It’s eventually revealed that the story is set many centuries after our own time, after the Twilight Centuries, and there are still remnants of pre-Twilight equip­ment for those who know how to use them. It’s not quite a postapocalyptic world – or rather, it’s many centuries on from disaster, such that folks are now simply living in the world as it is. While society has regressed in terms of the technology people can access, they are also simply getting on with life. Much as the people of early modern France did. It is, I think, a declaration of human resilience (or bloody-mindedness) in the face of catastrophe (much like life in Chasm City after the Melding Plague, in some of Reynolds’ Revelation Space stories).

Two technological aspects of the novella par­ticularly stand out. One is a wonderfully acerbic description of ‘‘artificial intelligence’’ being used for creative purposes, which is timely and im­mensely enjoyable. The other is Reynolds’s evoca­tion of ‘‘the Wald.’’ Named for the German word for forest, the Wald is a terrifying part of France that every right-thinking person avoids; if they don’t, they’re not likely to come out, and certainly not without incurring a cost. Some believe the Wald was made by humans, to combat pollution, but whatever its source, the reality is that the Wald is growing inexorably, no matter what humans do to stop it. This vision of (presumably) human technology, made for excellent reasons but which has got completely out of hand, was delightful.

The focus of The Dagger in Vichy is, on the face of it, very narrow: primarily the actions of Rufus, Guillaume, and Bernard, with others in the troupe having (to use a cliché) walk-on parts. But there is of course more to it than that. On a personal level, there are questions of loyalty and trust and ambition, paying debts and breaking promises. But the wider world that Reynolds hints at could easily have become a novel: who is the Impera­tor, who are the groups that are fighting and for what purpose, what happened during the Twilight Centuries and how has any of the technology survived. That these aspects only exist as fleeting, teasing hints – while still making sense within the context of the novella – added to the overall power of the story. (The historian in me also enjoyed the many historical references, such as to the Treaty of Koblenz, and His Holiness residing at Avignon.) I have always enjoyed Alastair Reynolds’s work, and – for all its departure from what I initially enjoyed, so many years ago now – this novella is an excellent addition to his oeuvre.

This review and more like it in the April 2025 issue of Locus.

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