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"I prefer working by artificial light."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Inert-Wear | ||
| Clothing made of dead fibers; clothing that is unmoving, static. |
In this short story, most fashionable people wore clothing made of bio-fabric, which transformed itself according to the mood and needs of the wearer. Some people, however, were not quite up to it.
| Certainly a careless or offhand customer who made the mistake of trying to climb into a wrong fitting, or, even worse, was endowed with a figure of less than Dietrich-like proportions, would receive brusque treatment from Georges and be directed with the shot of a lace cuff to the inert-wear shops in the town's amusement park.
This, of course, was a particularly bitter jibe. No one, with the exception of a few eccentrics or beachcombers, any longer wore inert clothing. The only widely worn inert garment was the shroud, and even here most fashionable people would not be seen dead in one. |
| Technovelgy from Say Goodby to the Wind,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Ultimate Publications, Inc. in 1970 Additional resources -
|
It is the sensitivity to mood that made bio-fabric so popular.
Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture than can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...
Inert-wear is one of those uniquely SFnal constructions like "groundcar" and "static home" which are used to identify the lame technologies we endure today
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
