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"Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is multiplex to the point of being unknowable."
- William Gibson
 |
| Skinsuit | ||
| Wearable artificial, full-body skin. |
| Nobody but me and my doctor and Sherman know which of my organs and limbs are my own, and I'm happy to keep it that way. I must care, or I wouldn't live in this lying skinsuit pretending to be a film star from the year 2034. That's right; the me everybody knows is patterned, down to the last birthmark, on a glamor queen we snatched from a terrorist explosion...
I should insert a grateful little plug here for those wonderful folks who brought us the skinsuit. Cut it: it bleeds. Stroke it: it responds just like the skin you used to have or takes the place of the skin it's covering. You're never aware you're wearing it. You can't feel it; you feel with it. It's semi-alive itself, and it works on some kind of symbiotic relationship with whatever's left of one's body. A handy thing about it is that it's a great deal more malleable than real skin. It can be reset to new features if the need arises. In the snatch teams, it often does. |
| Technovelgy from Millennium,
by John Varley. Published by Berkley Books in 1983 Additional resources -
|
Here's another except:
Compare to skin suit from Dinosaur Beach (1971) by Keith Laumer, transkin from Parasite Planet (1931), by Stanley G. Weinbaum, kloraderm from Old Man's War (2005), by John Scalzi, the diveskin from Starfish (1999) by Peter Watts and skintight from War Dogs (2014), by Greg Bear.
What first made me like him was his skinsuit. I'm not sure how old he was, but it must have been the early twenties. It was rumored that he had just about every mutated disease it was possible to have and still retain a brain, but one hears those rumors about a lot of people. I thought it was likely he was closer to gnome hood than I was, even though I was older. And yet he chose to wear a skinsuit that made him look like a man in his early sixties...
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Millennium
More Ideas
and Technology by John Varley
Tech news articles related to Millennium
Tech news articles related to works by John Varley
Skinsuit-related
news articles:
- MIT's Second Skin Enhances Original Skin
| Health Kiosk Has No Human Doctor |
| NEO Brain Computer Interface (BCI) |
| MIT Computerized Bionic Leg Is Part Of The User |
| Bone-Building Drug Evenity Approved |
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
