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"It was my preferred entertainment when I was a kid, so when I set out to be a writer, it was perfectly natural that I should write the sort of stories that I used to enjoy reading."
- John Brunner
 |
| Mirrorshades - Surgically Inset Glasses | ||
| Glasses that were implanted in the face of the wearer. |
In an age of affordable surgery to correct problems like short-sightedness, it was unusual for a person to wear corrective lenses. Much more unusual for the lenses to be implanted in the face, rendering the eyes permanently unreadable.
| He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. |
| Technovelgy from Neuromancer,
by William Gibson. Published by Phantasia Press in 1984 Additional resources -
|
Why would a person choose such a modification? Molly, whose glasses I refer to, did choose to conceal much of her life in the course of her employment as razor girl.
When the Finn scanned her, said "Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better compatibility with pyrolitics, but that's your business, right?"
In his blog, William Gibson has this to say about Molly's mirrorshades:
The character having emerged, very handily, in an early short story, when I hadn't been much concerned with this particular detail, and not having expected to see her again, I found myself, as more Molly narratives emerged, concerned by my inability to satisfactorily envision the way in which the damned things were attached. My solution to this, ongoing, was to keep the "camera" off that troubling little detail. To blur around it with language. The "mirrored implants" worked wonders for the character, in fact largely *were* the character, but there was never, really, any "really" there.
With Molly Millions' "implanted" glasses, though, I could never dream up a sufficiently convincing way to imagine them being attached. Were they "implanted" in skin, muscle, bone, all of these? How would any of these impact on the mobility of her features? What would the seam between skin and mirror look like?
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'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
