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" I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. And if I feel like going on, or if something turns me on I'll just keep writing till I'm written out."
- Roger Zelazny

Skintight  
  Specialized space suit for low atmospheric pressure environments like Mars.  

Time to describe a skintight. It's a remarkable piece of equipment, even when it's failing, even when you know you're going to die. Your standard Marsgrade skintight is a flexible and seamless suit woven from a continuous monomolecular strand of carbon coil flex, set into a bilayer gel mostly comfy to the skin. in the field, the skintight absorbs skin waste and conveys it through tiny tubes to storage packs around the butt...

Skintight fabric contains circuitry for battlefield diagnostic...

Technovelgy from War Dogs, by Greg Bear.
Published by Orbit in 2014
Additional resources -

Bear himself references Frank Herbert's stillsuit from Dune, which is pretty cool, I think.

Bear provides a lot more details, but for those you'll need to read the novel.

Just for fun, consider the 2006 Biosuit under development for the last decade (at least) by Dava Newman and her team, for real-life comparison purposes:


(Dava Newman with Biosuit at NextFest 2006)

Now, the most recent iteration:


( BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit )

Compare to skin suit from Dinosaur Beach (1971) by Keith Laumer, transkin from Parasite Planet (1931), by Stanley G. Weinbaum, kloraderm from Old Man's War (2005), by John Scalzi and the diveskin from Starfish (1999) by Peter Watts.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from War Dogs
  More Ideas and Technology by Greg Bear
  Tech news articles related to War Dogs
  Tech news articles related to works by Greg Bear

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Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand

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