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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
 |
| 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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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
