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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov

Crysknife  
  A knife blade ground from the tooth of a giant sandworm of Dune.  

The crysknife is the preferred hand-to-hand fighting weapon of the Fremen, the native people of Arrakis (the planet Dune).

Slowly, Mapes reached into the neck of her dress, brought out a dark sheath. A black handle with deep finger ridges protruded from it. She took sheath in one hand and handle in the other, withdrew a milk-white blade, held it up. The blade seemed to shine and glitter with a light of its own. It was double-edged like a kindjal and the blade was perhaps twenty centimeters long.


(Mapes shows crysknife from 'Dune' by Frank Herbert)

"Do you know this, my Lady?" Mapes asked.

It could only be one thing, Jessica knew, the fabled crysknife of Arrakis, the blade that had never been taken off the planet, and was known only by rumor and wild gossip.

Technovelgy from Dune, by Frank Herbert.
Published by Putnam in 1965
Additional resources -

It is manufactured in two forms from teeth taken from dead sandworms. The two forms are "fixed" and "unfixed." An unfixed knife requires proximity to a human body's electrical field to prevent disintegration. Fixed knives are chemically treated for storage. All are about 20 centimeters long.

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  More Ideas and Technology from Dune
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