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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Optical-Effect Suit | ||
| An invisibility garment. |
This is a fairly early presentation of this idea; William Gibson updates the concept in his mimetic polycarbon suit from his 1984 novel Neuromancer.
| I pulled the door wide, took out a limp, fish-scale textured coverall with heavy fittings moulded into the fabric at the small of the back and at the ankles. I pulled off my jacket, struggled into the garment: it was called an optical-effect suit, and it was one of the CBI’s best-kept secrets. It had the unusual property of absorbing some wavelengths of light and re-emitting them in the infrared, reflecting others in controlled patterns. It was auto-tuned over the entire visible spectrum, and was capable of duplicating any background pattern short of a clan Ginsberg tartan. I couldn’t walk down a crowded avenue in it without causing a few puzzled stares, but in any less crowded setting, it was as close an approximation of a cloak of invisibility as science had come up with. |
| Technovelgy from The Hounds of Hell,
by Keith Laumer. Published by IF in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the scramble suit from A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick, the mimetic polycarbon suit from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson and the abglanz from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.
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Tech news articles related to The Hounds of Hell
Tech news articles related to works by Keith Laumer
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
