Really! I swear I'm an intellectual! I mean I only read this stuff when I'm weak or drunk or something! ( )

This is one of those odd little gems that has stood out in my memory as a really sublime sf novel. On the outset, it's a book about a psychic suit that bonds with, controls, and manipulates its wearer for amazing reasons which gradually unfold through the novel.


But the book is so much more than that: It freewheels through a variety of spacefaring human cultures who have evolved and adapted to their respective environments, and dissects with remarkable precision not only the role of fashion in human society, but also our concepts of body image and our sense of self, and how these these things impact our understanding of what it means to be human. (The best sort of scifi, in other words.)

Underlying all those great themes is the plot itself, which builds on those foundations to introduce its trickiest question: what we consider to be intelligence, and how our human centric perception shapes interaction with other lifeforms.

It really is a stellar read, an inspired and very original novel, combining two things i like (scifi and fashion) and putting it under a literary microscope in the context of cultural examination. Plus, I'm willing to bet you've never read the word "sartorial" so many times in a scifi novel before!

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Clothes make the man in this adventure story. A con artist is our hero. ( )

A truly unique book and is the kind of thing that could only be written by Bayley. Conversely, the Daw edition features absolutely the worst cover on any SF novel I've ever seen.
Don't let the cover chase you away. This is a fascinating concoction about space armor,cyborgs, and the consideration of clothing as technology. You would never guess what a good novel this is from the doofy, coloring book, Scholastic book type DAW cover.

***1/2 ( )