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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- 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.
| It was an optical-effect suit - 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 diffraction patterns. It was auto-tuned over the entire visible spectrum, and was capable of duplicating any background pattern short of a clan Ginsberg tartan. |
| From A Plague of Demons,
by Keith Laumer. Published by Pocket Books in 1965 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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