Susan Cooper movie

[wombat1138]

Already in post-production. (IMDB has sidebar link to some photos, including Christopher Eccleston in costume as The Rider.)

Comments

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

...maybe? (Though of course it is magical crystal with various supernatural bonus features, so ordinary rules don't apply.)

The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl) and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass. In one of her stories, Tanith Lee describes dagger-sized glass knives as undetectable Renaissance murder weapons-- stab your enemy, break off the handle, pound the blade all the way in so it disappears into his body, and heigh-ho, supposedly no obvious wounds-- but she may've just been making that up.

Alternately, "crystal" might be interpretable as any natural crystalline stone-- quartz? diamond?-- but yeah, diamond at least is relatively brittle and subject to shock-fracturing, hence its facetability. I have no idea of the stress capacity of gigantous natural spear-like crystals (http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/crystals/mainframe3.html) (though the ones shown are made of selenite, which is a fairly soft stone; still, wouldn't want to have one of those things jabbed at me).

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass.

That's just it, though. You would know better than I, but I'd think the lattice structure of almost any crystal, if formed into a single big chunk, would make it (somewhat) easy(ish) to fragment with a hard side blow. Unless I'm completely wrong, natch. I wouldn't want a diamond stalactite to fall on me, but I wouldn't want someone to whip the edge of a sheet of paper across my throat, either.

Whether fictional or not, the Lee glass dagger seems to make sense, since it's meant for assassination rather than dueling (I guess). I could once have sworn I'd heard about ice bullets being used as even less detectable murder weapons during the Cold War--freeze some water in a bullet-shaped mold, very quickly shoot your target, sneak away--but apparently MythBusters debunked this (http://www.tv.com/mythbusters/ice-bullet-exploding-toilet-who-gets-wetter/episode/285545/summary.html).

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

If the "crystal" is really glass, then its internal structure isn't terribly well organized-- it's amorphous so it doesn't have a definite cleavage plane, but that just means that when it's whacked, the pieces that come off tend to be curved rather than straight. (The same thing is true of "cryptocrystalline" materials, which are sort of glommed together from a lot of individual crystals that're randomly aligned and teeny enough that they might as well be amorphous-- I think flint works that way.)

Supposedly, certain rare types of jade are nearly crystal-clear and colorless; those would make pretty nasty weapons, since iirc jade has a sort of "felted" internal structure with flat plates interwoven with each other, making it extremely resilient. (There are anecdotes that in the big 1906 earthquake out here, one collector of Asian artifacts lost all of the ceramics when they smashed off their shelves onto the floor-- but everything made of jade just *bounced*.) However, I don't think jade fits terribly well into Cooper's idiom in this series.