AtD 444-5 Spoiler (?)

[Dave Monroe]

   "Meanwhile, for days, weeks in some places, the
battles of the Taklamakan War were raging.[...] 
petroleum deposits far underground were attacked [...]
and great pilars of fire would ascend to the sky. 
>From Kashgar to Urumchi, the bazaars were full of
weapons [...] hardware nobody could identify [...]. 
These now fekll into the hands of goat-herders,
falconers, shamans, to be taken out into  the
emptiness, disassembled, dtudied, converted to uses
religious and practical, and eventually to change the
history of the World-Island ..." (AtD, Pt. III, pp.
444-5)


Taklamakan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taklamakan

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/chinamum/taklamakan.html

Bruce Sterling, "Taklamakan" (1998)

http://www.lib.ru/STERLINGB/taklamakan.txt

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?ASFOCTNOV98

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553576429

"Taklamakan" is set a few decades after "Bicycle
Repairman". Spider Pete has turned pro; he's now a
NAFTA spook, with all sorts of diabolical
federally-funded climbing toys. Pete and his partner
Katrinko have been dropped into the central
Taklamakan, a bitter desert in central Asia, to
investigate rumors of a secret facility that could
contain nuclear waste, or secret starships, or
something even weirder and more dangerous.

Ultimately, "Taklamakan" reaches a bit too far; as
things grow stranger and stranger, it loses momentum.
The tech is fascinating, however, particularly the
tools Pete carries. He stores images in a
biotechnological storage device that was grown to
mimic the visual cortex of an American bald eagle.
Medicines and stimulants are applied to the
bloodstream via bioengineered ticks that Pete and his
partner carry snug in their armpits. (Ecch.) Sterling
eventually presents us with a rather surreal look at
artificial life, but frankly none of his seething
self-assembled creepies can compete for sheer
niftiness with the choice spookware that Pete carries
safe in his warmer bodily crevices. 

http://www.epiphyte.net/SF/old-fashioned-future.html

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