The story of Aramis—the guided-transportation system intended for Paris—is told in this fictional account by several parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers.

Preface Prologue: Who Killed Aramis? 1. An Exciting Innovation 2. Is Aramis Feasible? 3. Shilly-Shallying in the Seventies 4. Interphase: Three Years of Grace 5. The 1984 Decision: Aramis Exists for Real 6. Aramis at the CET Stage: Will It Keep Its Promises? 7. Aramis Is Ready to Go (Away) Epilogue: Aramis Unloved Glossary

It is [the] world of machines that Latour sets out to rehabilitate in his clever new work…an eminently readable book—even on occasions a ripping good yarn. This time round, the author of such seminal sociology of science texts as We Have Never Been Modern has set out to do something daring: create a new genre, what he calls ‘scientifiction’… The result is a hypertext, weaving real and fictional characters together against the backdrop of an actual project carried out by RATP, the public transport authority for Paris… [A] feisty sociotechnological whodunit.

Aramis is a case study, a sociological investigation, and, yes, a detective novel unlike any ever written--a carefully constructed, non-fictional narrative of the negotiated fictions that underwrite our mechanical inventions. Latour, one of the most supple and rewarding practitioners of any science, shows that the construction of technological society is at base a human drama and must be told in a commensurate manner. Here at last is science studies that avoids self-exemption and partakes, with humor and emotion, of the very processes it depicts. Aramis is a strange but deep book that comes to counterintuitive, urgent conclusions, pleading for more successful parlay between technology and humanism, animate and inanimate, body and soul. This story has much to say about the world we want to build, the world we think we are building, and the worlds we have failed to pull off. -- Richard Powers, author of Galatea 2.2