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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl

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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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from A Plague of Demons
  More Ideas and Technology by Keith Laumer
  Tech news articles related to A Plague of Demons
  Tech news articles related to works by Keith Laumer

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