The blades of fiction, taken seriously: what Valyrian steel really is, whether obsidian daggers work, the physics a 700-pound greatsword ignores, and how a maker builds the real version – because every fan of a fictional blade is one good article away from wanting to grind a real one.
Comics run on invented metals — adamantium, vibranium, the whole periodic table of plot — and the fastest way to appreciate real metallurgy is…
Guts' Dragonslayer — the iconic slab from Berserk, "too big to be called a sword" — is the perfect specimen for the genre's favorite…
Herbert's crysknife is fiction's most sacred knife: ground from the crystal tooth of a sandworm, milky and iridescent, keyed to its owner, never sheathed…
Every fictional blade is a real design brief with the physics turned off. Turn the physics back on and something interesting happens: the analysis…
Brandon Sanderson handed his world's assassins a genuinely great materials-engineering problem: Allomancers can sense and violently manipulate metal, so the deadliest people in the…
Pierce Brown's razor is the best sci-fi blade brief in years: a meter of blade, harder than diamond in rigid form, that goes limp…
Tolkien's blades carry more cultural weight than any weapons in fiction, and — fitting for a philologist steeped in Norse saga — they are…
George R.R. Martin settled the biggest question himself: Valyrian steel's closest real-world analog, in his words, is Damascus steel. That one sentence connects the…
Geralt's two-sword rig — steel for men, silver for monsters — is one of fantasy's best-known loadouts, and the lore is more metallurgically literate…