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"The primary attraction [of writing sf] is the sheer pleasure of creating something from whole cloth."
- Dan Simmons
 |
| Plastirobe | ||
| A dress that varies in opacity by distance. |
Ed Morris really isn't up to a night on the town after dealing with endless visual ads on the way home from work on Ganymede.
| She leaped to her feet. "Let's go out tonight and celebrate. Okay?" Her slim fingers fumbled at the zipper of her shorts. "I'll put on my new plastirobe, the one I've never had nerve enough to wear."
Her eyes sparkled with excitement as she hurried into the bedroom. ""You know the one I mean? When you're up close it's translucent but as you get farther off it becomes more and more sheer until -" "I know the one," Morris said wearily. "I've seen them advertised on my way home from work..." |
| From Sales Pitch,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Future Science Fiction Magazine in 1954 Additional resources -
|
For other science-fictional fashions, check out the biofabric from a 1970 J.G. Ballard story, and the scramble suit from PKD's A Scanner Darkly.
Consider the disappearing dress - an art project created by Helen Storey and a group of artisans.
(The Disappearing Dress [video file])
The garment is constructed of a water soluble polymer. When dissolved the fabric turns into a tiny amount of liquid gel which can be reconstituted into a solid once more or used to grow plants. The dress is a dramatic illustration of how the material behaves.
In a light rain, the disappearing dress would act kind of like a plastirobe - at first opaque, then increasingly transparent.
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| The Hammock Caravan And Italo Calvino's Octavia |
| Americans! Stay Indoors To Save Energy |
| Nissan ProPILOT Slippers Are Self-Parking, Autonomous |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'Of course not a vehicle moved by means of internal explosions of a derivative of rock oil...'
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'
'If you couldn't see the ads, how would you know what was fashionable?'
'Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed.'
'Had these machines in some incredible fashion been provided with brains?'
'I used my implant to tell MILLIE what we wanted and she took care of it'
'Under the lower roof there was no water, but a clear and luminous atmosphere...'
