The Assassination of Valentin de Renard

I admit, the story behind “The Assassination of Valentin de Renard” is quite an arrogant one.

Have you ever seen “Memento”? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. It’s one of Christopher Nolan’s best – with a filmography as illustrious as his, it’s extremely impressive that his first major film (not counting his low-budget debut “Following”) was as fleshed-out and comprehensive as it was. It’s a film built around a storytelling gimmick which in lesser hands could’ve collapsed into something of infinite ridicule. The protagonist, played by Guy Pearce, has a short-term memory that would be lauded in the goldfish community. His short bursts of recollection are told in reverse order, so the start of the movie is actually its ending and vice versa.

So what does my short story have to do with this? Well, like any other creative with a world of stories at his fingertips, I immediately felt compelled to write my own “Memento” once the credits rolled. I’d had this idea of doing an historical story about a king’s tragic downfall, but I now planned it in such a way that would work both backwards and forwards. How Christopher Nolan managed to tie together two dozen scenes in the same format I’ll never know.

To make this possible within the story, I invented a device called a “Reconstructor”. It’s effectively a futuristic G-clamp that gets tightened around a destroyed document, such as a burnt diary, and the lasers and other Sci-Fi goodness (I’m sure there’s a dash of advanced AI in there too) reconstruct the document to be as it was before the damage. For the “story told backwards” gimmick, I simply made it so the diary was more burnt at the front than the back – hence the Reconstructor would finish the final chapters before the first.

But who would own such a device? I imagined a couple of historians, maybe university students out in the field, would bring a Reconstructor with them while investigating a new lead. From there, the story of Marshall and Hero wrote itself.

In order to make the futuristic segments relevant to the diary’s historical account, it made sense to have one of the historians be related to the writer of the diary. This naturally lent itself to conflict between my two historians – having one be proud of their ancestry while the other be more narrow-minded and focused on the academics meant I could spice up their scenes with an argument or two. It wasn’t my intention for the first two stories of the collection to both be about legacy, but it’s a happy coincidence that ties the two together nicely.

So, why did I write this story in particular? Without delving into too many spoilers, I wanted to show how historical accounts can be biased and sometimes inaccurate. I frame Rimbaud’s diary as an account of French history that was never uncovered until now – this implies that someone, or many people, must have censored the history books. Can you imagine how much of history we’ve never heard? A troubling thought. As you’ll understand if you read the story, history seems doomed to repeat itself.

Will we see this kind of technology in the future? It’s hard to say. The idea of an AI device recreating something that was once lost already exists in some formats. Hell, I’m pretty sure old historical diaries are being artificially repaired as I’m typing this. I’ll be the first in line with wallet in hand when someone invents the laser-powered G-clamp.